Sabrina Ouazani is an Algerian Beauty

But Lambert Wilson is an asshole. An ignorant. A peasant. To put in nicer, no real gentleman. I'm sure most of you landed on this page via Google search you know the incident better than me -it dates back to spring 2010. The setting: an actress in her twenties -one that takes everything with a smile, the failure of an actor in his fifties, Cannes Film Festival; they co-star in the film, they have a photo call together. She is ravishing, and she is probably his (poor girl); he wants to show off, which he shamelessly does. Lambert Wilson has the nerve to be inappropriately intimate with Sabrina Ouazani in front of  thousands of cameras and photo journalists, consecutively in front of the millions of gossip fans. He then feels ashamed and kisses the producer, too, to make his faux pas a bit lighter. Or my story is just fictional and he wanted to attract attention to his bad boy(?) persona. Whatever, idiot; stay in your black list for good.

This post, though, is dedicated to the Algerian Beauty Sabrina and to her talent to be able to have the looks of the girl next door and/or the as hot as one can be. Almost a kid when she starred in L'Esquive (2004) or Games of Love and Chance, brought by her mum right at Abdellatif Kechiche's casting, she also features in his second film, The Secret of the Grain (2007), which garners many prizes. Then come Les Nuits d'Arabie and Paris, where I find her and reflect on how and why a talent and a beauty like hers can be restrained in roles that draw upon her Algerian origins -something quite unfair. In fact, my post on her is a very popular one that lets me understand that she has quite an audience out there; fair enough.

Since 2007 that I was commenting on such issues of typecast according to origin and looks, little changed; Sabrina Ouazani, along with other talented girls with the same mixed-French background, like Leïla Bekhti and Hafsia Herzi, continues to play roles that are more or less the same i.e. the Arabic girl. Of Gods and Men (2010) is the story of some monks within an Algerian community and their contact with terrorists; La Source des Femmes (2011) is a tale about Arabic women and the battle of sexes; and so on, so forth. Roles that present little challenge, without me insinuating here that she and her peers is not good at them; quite the opposite. But, being doomed to be nothing more that what your papers say, and what your name gives away, at the same time with being an actress is a sad thing indeed.

An actor is originally somebody who embodies a million different things, who makes metamorphose his second skin, who is never seen with the same vestimentary choice twice. An actor should not be the easy way out for the industry to solve their puzzling casting headaches. For god's sake (or should I say for Allah's sake?), give the girls a chance to prove themselves; they may very well be something more than an alluring banlieu "Other".