The sense of touch will usually precede either sight or sound in the films of Maryam Touzani, a magic trick in a medium where tactility should technically off the table. No sooner does her magnificent third feature “Calle Málaga” start than to see the hand of Maria Angeles (Carmen Maura) running through barrels of grain in a farmers market below her apartment in Tangier and it can feel as if the beans are running through your own fingers, stirring the soul with such a simple pleasure of life, but ultimately setting up how devastating it can be to have such a routine ripped away at a moment’s notice. It wouldn’t seem like much to ask of the octogenarian to move in with her daughter Clara (Maura Etura) to help take care of her grandkids and the proceeds from the sale of her apartment could make for a softer landing for Clara, who is going through a tough divorce, but it can be all traced back to those beans why Maria Angeles is so resistant when she worked so hard herself to get her life just how she wanted and throwing it all into flux seems like a betrayal of herself.
However, if it sounds like Touzani is preparing audiences for an unforgiving drama, there is as much comedy in her most broadly appealing effort to date without sacrificing the depth of feeling in every other respect that have made previous work so emotionally satisfying. Maria Angeles fits right in with the heroines of “Adam” and “The Blue Caftan,” women that have to get crafty about keeping the status quo in the face of a life-changing event, but the director brings in vibrant colors early and often to reflect the spirit of a senior citizen by age only and recognizes a sharp comic premise when she won’t go quietly into retirement. Although she agrees to sell the apartment to aid Clara, left with little choice when the underlying rights are in her daughter’s name thanks to her late husband, she sets her sights almost immediately upon making a return, cataloguing in her head all the items that are sold off to an antique dealer named Abslam (Ahmed Boulane) that she’ll have to retrieve and biding her time at a nursing home until Clara has left town to resettle in her longtime home. (It helps that the realtor in charge of selling the apartment also breaks in from time to time to conduct one-night stands, which allows Maria Angeles to blackmail him into keeping his mouth shut about her own stay.)
Even if she weren’t frequently clad in the most radiant of reds, Maura looks positively regal in the lead and she is seen warmly as a product of her environment, a neighborhood where everyone looks out for one another when the foundation for the largely Spanish community in Morocco was created by political refugees who fled the Franco dictatorship. While Maria Angeles has few close confidants after the passing of her husband, neighbors are more than happy to help with hacks for electricity and water and she finds a novel way to start having money roll in as well upon learning local laws regarding serving alcohol. Confronted with the worst, Touzani finds the threat of being moved brings out the best in Maria Angeles when it keeps her active, engaged and drawn a little bit out of her comfort zone and she ends up with some lovely opportunities to get out of the house as she starts to form a connection with Abslam, who she visits every time she has the money to buy back another one of her things, and the film’s most ingenious creation, a nun (María Alfonsa Rosso) that has taken a vow of silence and can’t respond verbally to all the sins that Maria Angeles gleefully confesses to as a part of keeping her home.
Beyond the film’s wicked sense of humor, Touzani shows an impressively light touch elsewhere when she doesn’t feel compelled to make out Clara as a villain in order for Maria Angeles to be a hero and it’s easy to imagine the harried mother and nurse as a reflection of the woman that Maria Angeles once was and now deserving of being able to live life on her own terms. That both can’t have that same peace concurrently is the film’s great tragedy, but even with the dynamic mother-daughter relationship that shows so much compassion for both, the edge is given to Maria Angeles when it’s easy to understand why it’s so important to cling onto her home as Touzani has created a space in “Calle Málaga” that you’ll want to stay in forever yourself.
“Calle Malaga” will screen at the Venice Film Festival at the Sala Giardino on August 29th at 9 pm and August 30th at 9 am. It will also screen at the Toronto Film Festival on September 9th at 6:30 pm at the TIFF Lightbox, September 10th at 6:15 pm and September 12th at 3:15 pm at the Scotiabank.