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Montréal Girls (2023)

Ramy (Hakim Brahimi) is young and passionate–and the thing he wants more in life than anything else is to become a poet. Yet, he’s moved to Montreal to go to medical school and get a more stable job. When arriving he meets two Montréal Girls, Yaz (Sana Asad) and Desiree (Jasmina Parent)–and they will change his life. As that change begins to happen, as he begins to question everything about himself, he’s not sure how to proceed–looking anywhere and everywhere for answers. Will he find them?


I adore this soundtrack, as it manifests strength and fun in a series of unique ways. It’s a brilliant combination of dramatic, passionate, and cheesy in a way that it both propels Montréal Girls to new levels but also allows it to remain grounded and accessible. The simple and relatable sounds of the soundtrack keep it grounded, allowing it to make sense to viewers every step of the way–and yet the lyrics in nearly every song have meaning that supplements the scene it which they occur, and they allow viewers not only to feel something, but to truly understand the things that play out before them.

Montréal Girls is based heavily on sex–but I feel that this is appropriate. We’ve all been young and known what it’s like to yearn for power, to crave the attention of those we are attracted to. Montréal Girls brings these things to life through Ramy–and as viewers watch him grow and begin to understand himself in new ways, sex helps viewers to see and feel that passion that flows through the character.


One thing and one thing only caused me to struggle with the film–the sound. The actors’ voices don’t carry appropriately. They often feel like they are layered on top of other sounds rather than taking place at the same time as anything else on screen. The separation of different layers of sound makes certain moments in the film difficult to appreciate or even to access. This really is my only gripe with Montréal Girls, as just about everything else works in the film’s favor. It’s fun and full of passion, and the relationship that viewers forge with Ramy by the end of the film is nothing short of spectacular.


Ramy is the main character of Montréal Girls, and it’s important that he, more than any other character, connects with viewers. Toward the beginning of the film I found him difficult to appreciate, I even found him to be a tad troublesome as a character, incapable of connecting with viewers. I anticipated failure; I truly believed that Montréal Girls would struggle to reach me as a result of Ramy’s unrelatability and Brahimi’s lack of talent. I could not have been more wrong. I think we, as viewers (myself included), forget that characters can sometimes take time to develop and become likable. Both Brahimi and Ramy needed time to grow into the character that resonates with viewers, that moves the story forward, and that ultimately relays a series of messages to those viewers. At the start Ramy feels like a complete stranger, and by the conclusion of Montréal Girls he felt like a friend, someone that I had grown with over the course of years.


Montréal Girls does things that I never believed it could have. I didn’t expect the emotional relevance or its powerful storytelling ability–but it is brilliant. Even in the opening moments of the film, as things played out in a fashion that didn’t seem to lend itself to success, I questioned whether or not Montréal Girls would ever be able to reach me, but as it moves forward it develops in a way that makes viewers feel at home. We can feel what Ramy feels by the end, and it slowly becomes clear that Writer-Director Patricia Chica and Co-Writer Kamal John Iskander knew what they were doing from the start–and Montréal Girls becomes one of the most relevant and relatable films that I’ve seen this year.


Directed by Patricia Chica.


Written by Patricia Chica & Kamal John Iskander.


Starring Hakim Brahimi, Jasmina Parent, Sana Asad, Jade Hassouné, Manuel Tadros, etc.


⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐½/10


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