The film Satin Rouge tells the story of Lilia, a widowed woman living with her conservative in-laws in an Arab nation. She rediscovers her sexuality through learning belly dancing. While dancing empowers her and helps her find joy, it also places her in a marginalized profession with low wages. Though dancing allows her to transcend social rules, she still hides her job from friends and family out of fear of rejection. The film aims to portray female empowerment, but some critics argue it also objectifies women and places belly dancing in an orientalist context. Additionally, the ending where Lilia uses her relationship with a man to blackmail him undermines the message of empowerment through most of the film.

1. Satin Rouge
Satin Rogue is a feature film by Raja Amari of the female gender’s self-expression in any age or
class.
The tale of a delightful widowed worker from a legitimate family who rediscovers her sexuality
through hip twirling has the same vision of the swiveling body as a vehicle toward individual
freedom.
Since ''Satin Rouge'' is set in an Arab nation, the social obstacles that the courageous woman,
Lilia (Hiam Abbass), must overcome to accomplish her self-disclosure are significantly more
imposing than the obstructions of age and class. Lilia, who lives in a similar house with her
strait-bound in-laws and disobedient daughter, feels constrained to keep her night exercises a
mystery.
Lilia's change starts when she watches her daughter Salma at a dancing class and suspects her of
having a affair to one of the performers. Researching further, she visits a supper club and finds
an exotic underground culture where sparsely clad ladies in sequined ensembles move alluringly
for uncontrollably thankful, generally male groups of onlookers.
Hiam Abbass in Lilia she creates a character whose beauty is enhanced by her sadness and is
only lacking that animation that she eventually gets through dancing. With her high-arched,
darkly defined eyebrows and tight facial features, it’s like watching a prep school headmistress
finally learn to cut loose and express herself.
In dancing, she’s practically learning to breathe, learning how to get the joy out of life that has
eluded her for so long, and watching it, you can’t think of anyone who deserves it more. Anytime
Lilia is on the screen, it’s easy to forget any flaws the film may have, because Abbass leaves no
space between the audience and herself; it’s the kind of performance that is able to honor the
traditional female role even as it taps into the rawness of discovering that new you that you were
always meant to find.
Film scholar Viola Shafik denounces the disintegration of the female body through editing into
close-ups and the male voyeuristic gaze associated with belly dance performances on screen
(Shafik, 2007: 165). While her reading remains accurate, one could argue that belly dance
cinematic representation is also the site of tensions between the exhilaration and celebration of
the female body and the conservative views of a society in which female dancers are demonized
and cinematic productions are tightly censored. While these conservative views are scarcely
challenged by the narrative, famous belly dance
stars who incarnated married characters, or characters in love with the male protagonist.

2. Moreover, by emphasising Lilia’s trance-like state, Amari suggests that her heroine is able to
enter a transcendent state in dance, whereby patriarchal rules are irrelevant and she can
overcome the oppressive morality that incarcerates her. Reading the film as just another example
of eroticisation or exoticisation thus misreads the many formal and thematic features that Amari
deploys in order to maintain her heroine’s agency and resist submitting her to an objectifying
(male) gaze. Nevertheless, despite Amari’s attempts to avoid objectification or exoticisation, the
ambivalent critical responses to her portrayal of Lilia’s body in Satin rouge illustrate Keft-
Kennedy’s argument that ‘[t]he belly dancer produces a constant and complex slippage between
the practice of belly dancing as a symbol of female empowerment on the one hand, and
orientalist figurations of “Eastern otherness” linked to colonialist discourse on the other’.
While Amari’s film positions the belly dancing body as a site that enables the (re)discovery of
(older) female sexual identity and desire, it nonetheless places belly dance against a backdrop of
poor working conditions, social stigma and societal marginalisation. Not only does Lilia earn a
low wage and get mistaken for a prostitute, but she remains unable to express her nocturnal
identity in her daily life for fear of social rejection and alienation. She hides her new job from
her neighbours and her daughter and must lie when her late husband’s brother, Uncle Béchir
(Salah Miled), comes to stay. On the one hand, the heroine’s decision to keep her new profession
hidden from family and friends reveals the overwhelming power of the prevailing social order;
however, on the other, it also fails to challenge it in any real way. Rather than confronting “social
hypocrisy”, Lilia’s dual existence effectively endorses it, thereby undermining the subversive
power of her actions. By contrast to Lilia, the character of Folla refuses to hide her unorthodox
lifestyle and outwardly confronts the parochial opinions and attitudes of others. She lives alone
and seems completely unashamed of her non-conventional profession and/or lifestyle.
But there’s still those pesky message issues. Lilia starts her own affair with Chokri, who has no
idea that he is sleeping with his girlfriend’s mother. In the end, this gives Lilia power over
Chokri, and in a scene of surprising Queen Bitchiness, Lilia basically tells Chokri that he will
marry Salma or risk her finding everything out. What exactly is this trying to tell us?
Supposedly, up until this point, the whole film has been built on the idea of a liberating kind of
empowerment, a kind with the distinctly positive effect of helping a mourning
woman overcome her pain, but now, suddenly we’re supposed to allow blackmail onto the list of
privileges that come with this liberation? An entire film based on good intentions is suddenly
turned on to a more dubious power definition. It mars an otherwise amiable little film that up
until that point, gamely insists that breaking out is the only way to find happiness.
But female empowerment is something way different in the way, you shouldn’t expose yourself
just to break the chains of constraint. Instead it acts as a visual pleasure for the men, the theory of
Laura Mulvey. Instead of being empowered the women become submissive under the dominant
men of the society.
As for female empowerment, a woman should not please the man and gain that much freedom as
she does when she does please him.

3. Thus in regards to ‘Satin Rouge’ I agree to it somewhat, the woman should embrace her
sexuality and in doing so must not give herself to the men to attain her freedom, as that is not
true empowerment or freedom, as you are still chained in the man’s world.