Director: Maryam Touzani
Writers: Nabil Ayouch, Maryam Touzani
Stars: Carmen Maura, Marta Etura, Ahmed Boulane
Synopsis: An aging Spanish woman in Tangier resists her daughter’s decision to sell her home. Determined to stay, she does everything she can to keep her home and reclaim the belongings of a lifetime. Along the way, she rediscovers love and desire.
When I went into Calle Málaga, I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect. I went in completely blind, and if you (like me) enjoy being put under a film’s spell, you will certainly be entranced here. Calle Málaga is a filling, heartbreaking, and rich film about one’s home and the forces that want to take that away from us. But I had no idea just how invested I would be by the city of Tangier, Morocco and the world set up by Calle Málaga. Simply put, Calle Málaga is as excellent as it is crushing.
Calle Málaga is about an elderly woman in Tangier named Maria Angeles (Carmen Maura) who is unceremoniously evicted from her home of over forty years and her fight to get it back. The kicker is that the person evicting her is Maria’s own daughter, Clara (Marta Etura), who legally owns the flat and is selling it to cover expenditures relating to Clara’s messy divorce in Madrid. The eviction, while tragic in its own right, has also given her a new lease on life. The set up and delivery is incredibly simple but its unremarkable quality is a major feature for this film. In going this direction, the film’s focus is incredibly controlled and you can then spend more time to see how the seeds planted through each scene blossoms until the very end.
Maria is a stubborn yet densely layered woman. Her resilience is admirable and left me immensely charmed during the duration of the film. This woman has a routine of seeing a childhood friend who is now a nun, vowed to silence, and Maria tells of her daily drama, going to her local street market asking the men who run the various shops to do favors for her, and visiting the graveyard where her husband and various deceased friends now reside. In another film, this routine could become incredibly stale and quite quickly, but Maura’s presence and charisma keeps the film moving. Hell, I can’t relate to an elderly Moroccan woman who is on the verge of losing everything but Maura can really sell it.
With that said, Calle Málaga’s greatest feature is its texture. Tangier, as much as Maria, is a character in its own right. The film’s director, Maryam Touzani, is a native of Tangier and her experiences and lifestyle feel rich and, although I’ve never been to Tangier myself, I feel as if I understand it better having seen this film. Tangier has been Maria’s home for all of her life, and the prospect of leaving it feels devastating. To an extent, Calle Málaga feels like a break-up film, given the untimely removal from her home. While obviously displacement places a greater toll on someone than a romantic break-up, the feeling of devastation is easily translated to someone who has never felt geographically displaced.
Calle Málaga pulls a veil over your eyes during the duration of the runtime. You are lulled into this false sense of safety, as if everything will be alright. Maria is at the hands of her daughter who has clearly made up her mind about what she’ll do with the flat without consulting her. But Maria is spunky, she fights hard to keep her home and rebuild it after parts of it go away. The heartbreak you feel at the beginning of the movie drops like a hammer at the end when you see how much community she has built for herself. Few films can pull off the “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me,” but at the end you feel betrayed, in the most morbidly delicious ways possible. I walked out of my screening heartbroken but proud to have been put under this film’s spell – to feed from the director’s hand then to take it away from you (thank you Maryam Touzani).
If you want to spend a good two-ish hours in the theater you will not be disappointed with Calle Málaga. I was the youngest person in my screening of the film, but that shouldn’t stop you from seeing it. If you want a good cry, whether happy or sad, you will have no shortage of reasons to pull from. A film that lifts you up then pushes you down should not feel this good (but it certainly does). Calle Málaga is a charming film and Carmen Maura completely captures your heart with her no nonsense drive as Maria.
