Arab Blues (original French title Un Divan à Tunis - "A Couch in Tunis") is a 2019 French-Tunisian film directed by Manele Labidi and starring Golshifteh Farahani.
Selma Derwish (Farahani) is a young Tunisian-born psychoanalyst who has lived a large part of her life in Paris. She returns to her birth country and opens a practice in Ezzahra, a coastal town on the southern outskirts of Tunis, and faces troubles with local administrations. The locals either don't see how useful her profession is there, or they just don't get what it's about, though after The Arab Spring, they wonder what the future of the country will be made of.
This film provides examples of the following tropes:
- The Alleged Car: Selma gets force-sold a crappy old Peugeot pickup truck with creaky doors that doesn't fit her needs, to say the least. It even gets her in mild trouble with the police, as they wonder why a woman like her would drive such a thing.
- Bilingual Dialogue: There's plenty of dialogue that goes back and forth between Arabic and French.
- Chatty Hairdresser: Selma goes to one such for a new haircut. The hairdresser even invokes the perceived uselessness of psychoanalysts in Tunisia, for at least "when the customers talk and talk and talk... they go out of here primped, with a new haircut" and wonders exactly what Selma's patients get after talking to her.
- Comically Missing the Point: The man Selma talks with at the beginning keeps guessing about a portrait they both look at, without Selma telling him anything. He keeps trying to guess the portrait's identity (her father? her grandfather? a Muslim Brotherhood guy?), then she tells him he's a Jew, and he's "her boss". The portrait happens to be the famous one of Sigmund Freud with his cigar, with a fez added to his head (it can be seen on the poster).
- Freudian Couch: Selma brought a couch along for her practice.
- Police Are Useless: Selma is controlled by the police due to her crappy car. They want to control her alcohol level, but because they're underfunded, they have no breathalyzer at hand, so one cop simply asks her to... blow in his face (It Makes Sense in Context).
- Sexist Used Car Salesman: Mild case with the car salesman Selma goes to see to buy a car. He says "women always have a lot of stuff", then admits he doesn't care about his wife.
- There Are No Therapists: A number of people wonder why Selma set up shop in such a place as Tunisia, as they don't see the need for psychoanalysts there.
