The Arab of the Future

When Riad's Syrian father shows his son how to draw a Mercedes, he insists that the wheels are rectangular—one of many disjunctures between dogma and reality observed by the small child. Although Riad is born in France to a French mother, the family relocates to Muammar Gaddafi's Libya and then Bashar al-Assad's Syria, where despite idealistic propaganda, buildings crumble, food is scarce, squatters displace residents, trash and human waste are everywhere, and his father's dreams for pan-Arab sovereignty are obviously delusionary. Public cruelty dominates daily life: his cousins attack him, children torture puppies, hanged criminals dangle in public, and women eat the men's leftovers. Yet filmmaker/cartoonist Sattouf (Pascal Brutal) remembers fondly the smell of sweat and the taste of Syrian foods. His blobby characters and pastel halftones contrast ironically with the sometimes-grim content.