It never needs to be said in “Calle Malaga” that it’s probably taken decades for Maria Angeles (Carmen Maura) to get her apartment in Tangier exactly how she wanted it, a modest flat bursting with life when each item found its station with great care and consideration for the place it holds in her heart. The 80-year-old wouldn’t mention the effort herself when she goes about everything with such grace in her golden years, enjoying retirement where she lives above a bustling street where she can simply go downstairs to pick up her groceries and visit the local church and say her prayers, but getting this comfortable wasn’t easy as she can be reminded when welcoming her daughter Clara (Marta Etura) home and see her overwhelmed with the kind of stress that once might’ve had balancing the needs of her family. With a time of such relaxation seeming so far away for Clara, it can seem quite practical for her to ask Maria Angeles to sell the apartment that she grew up in to solve the many problems facing her as she reels from a difficult divorce and could use the cash as well as the supervision that her mother could provide to her grandchildren when it’s assumed she could move in with her back across the border in their native Spain, but unthinkable otherwise to give up everything.
The seemingly small interpersonal conflict is the kind that “Adam” director Maryam Touzani can make feel as if the entire world is riding on it when it has those stakes for the characters involved and in what may be her finest feature to date and by extension, one of the most satisfying films in recent memory, one thankfully isn’t deprived of seeing how Maria Angeles shrewdly built a life for herself, only it isn’t seen in flashbacks. Instead when Clara uses the leverage she was given by her late father to dictate the fate of her parents’ apartment and puts it on the market, Maria Angeles shows she still has her wits about her and then some as she schemes to reclaim her home as it sits unsold, finding ways to come up with the cash to buy back her treasured heirlooms from a local antique dealer (Ahmed Boulane) and the flat itself while her daughter thinks she’s at a nursing home. Although occasionally this devious behavior requires a confession to Sister Josefa (Maria Alfonsa Rosso), who has thankfully taken a vow of silence that prevents her from spilling any secrets, the film revels in following an unapologetic woman who comes to see her twilight years as her opportunity to really shine.
Featuring a luminous Maura, who shows the wicked comedic chops she deployed so sharply in her collaborations with Pedro Almodovar and Alex de la Iglesia, as well as a tenderness that makes Maria Angeles unforgettable, the film’s celebration of an older woman is all the most robust because of how dynamically Touzani depicts the relationships between a mother and daughter and all they have to overcome in sorting their own differences out. Her latest film isn’t autobiographical in that sense, but it surely was inspired by the admiration that the filmmaker had for her own mother, who unexpectedly passed away shortly after the director triumphed at Cannes with her previous picture “The Blue Caftan.” With “Calle Malaga” recently selected by Morocco as its official entry to the Oscars following premieres at the Venice and Toronto Film Festivals where it was greeted by well-deserved standing ovations, Touzani generously took the time to talk about how thinking back to the time spent with all the women in her family gave her joy at a time of great personal loss and how she was able to channel that into a lighthearted drama that could be a balm for all.
How did this come about?
It’s a film that is really born out of pain because I lost my mom right before the opening of “The Blue Caftan” and my mom and I had a very, very strong bond. [Her passing] was just completely unexpected and when I lost my mom, this film was really born out of the need to continue talking with her. My mom was half-Spanish. Her mom was Spanish and I grew up speaking a lot Spanish with my mom. That was the main language between us, although she spoke Arabic as well, but we used to speak a lot in Spanish and she used to cook all the Spanish food for me, so when my mom left, it was really the need of delving back into my memories of smelling the food she cooked again and of speaking to her again in Spanish, so that’s how the film came to be.
This character of Maria Angeles is really born from that need of continuing to feel her presence and then it’s mixed with my grandmother as well because my grandmother was living with us when I grew up and I was very close to her as well, so all the memories of my grandmother, of her friends, everything just got mixed up. And I just started writing. It was something visceral and it had to come out. It couldn’t be otherwise, and that’s what helped me get through this period. And my mom lived in Tangiers, so going back to shoot there was really a way of confronting her absence because for me, Tangiers was my mom and I knew that if I didn’t do that, I would completely cut the link between me and the city that I love so much.
All your films really take you into the community of people that live around your main character in such a way it seems like there’s a great fusion between these places and your production. What’s it like to forge that bond?
For me, it was really important to understand what Tangiers is about because it’s a very, very unique place because of its history — it was international, a Spanish protectorate, and there’s this whole mix of cultures in Tangiers. And on this particular street, the past and present live together with these ancient facades and [on] the street [itself with its market], you have all these new objects that are coming from China and some from Morocco. There is a mixture of everything and the energy that comes along with this is really interesting. I really wanted to be as faithful as possible to this energy that’s just so authentic and also recreate the relationship that Maria Angeles has with her environment because that is what is so special, especially when we live in a world where our relationships become more and more distant because we order online or you go to the supermarket.
In places like Tangiers, you still go to the [street] market and there’s still the people that have been selling you vegetables for 20 years and you have a conversation with them. It’s something that I find very touching and very beautiful because the human link exists. The human connection is really present. Of course, it’s always tricky because when you’re going to shoot [in such a live environment], it requires a lot of preparation in how you deal with the whole market, but I love spending a lot of time in the places that I’m going to be shooting in and speaking to the people and getting to know them. Because for me, it’s important to mainly to feel that there is a connection that’s created before the film arrives. It’s not like we’re just going to get here and shoot. No, I want there to be a link as well.
You really feel it. Did Carmen Maura immediately come to mind for Maria Angeles?
Actually, no. I didn’t necessarily have her in mind, but when she read the script, she fell in love with the character completely and when I met her, I fell in love with her. I realized that she really was so close to the Maria Angeles I had imagined because she has that kind of energy, that love for life and that vitality. There is something that touches me very much about Carmen Maura as well, and I think it’s in her eyes. It’s like you can feel the little girl. She has aged, of course, but you feel the younger woman that she was and the lady she is today and that’s something that touched me as well.
Maria Angeles is such a rich character and as with the lead characters in all your films, the story is structured in such a way that you really get to see them in different parts of their life. Is that actually something you’ve been conscious of?
I never think consciously when I’m writing. When I write, I’m completely absorbed by my characters and with this film in particular, I don’t even know who I am when I’m writing. I go to sleep with the story and the character in my mind and I’ll close my eyes and just be with my character. With Maria Angeles. I’ll just shut off the light and live in the night with her and laugh and cry and wake up in the morning and write. And I never know where I’m going as I’m writing. I really have the feeling that my characters are taking me places and that I just allow allow them. But I think all these places exist somehow inside for a reason because they make sense afterwards when I read my scripts. I’m never in a rational projection or analysis of what I’m doing. I just advance. And then when I read [the script back], I understand why some things have come into the films.
Characters like Josefa, for instance. I never thought, “Okay, [Maria Angeles] is going to have a nun friend, but it’s only later that I put the pieces together and I understand everything doesn’t make sense, so it’s always very interesting once I’ve written to go back and understand, because there’s a lot of thingsI learn about myself and things that have marked me. I think we’re all somehow like sponges and we absorb so many things. There are things that mark us and remain within us and there is a certain moment in our life where they emerge for a certain reason and in a certain manner to tell the story that we need to tell at that particular moment. So it’s never really rational. There are moments of humor in the film that I had not imagined, but I just needed them because it was so emotionally intense for me that I think I just needed to laugh once in a while and, you know, wipe off my tears and move on.
Sister Josefa certainly provides some of that and the actress playing her has the most remarkable face. How did you find her?
Yeah, I fell in love with her when I saw her and I really wanted somebody that would be able to express emotions like she does because she does not say a word. That’s very, very hard and she naturally has that in her. She’s a wonderful actress, and the expressiveness of her eyes and the wrinkles on her face, I find absolutely beautiful. They’re like rivers running through her face, so I just imagined her and Carmen Maura together and I just loved the image of it.
From the last time we talked, I know that there’s not an item that’s on the set that doesn’t have a history to it. Were there things in Maria Angeles’ apartment that were super important for you to get in there?
This apartment I spent a lot of time on. I always do, but this one maybe even more because the objects here are also the objects of a lifetime, and in this film in particular, these objects are going to go away and then she’s going to have to want to bring them back. It’s part of her regaining her life and her rebirth, realizing that she’s still alive and these objects of her past are essential to her. So it was essential for me to have these objects that would be like witnesses to her life. The walls are witnesses because they’re not only walls. She’s lived through so many things in this apartment and with the set designers, we were looking for the right objects to put in from the start. There are these owls that for me are very meaningful because they have eyes and they look at everything that’s happening in this apartment. They’re like silent witnesses in a sense, just like Josefa is.
And there are objects from my life as well. For example, the grinder is my great grandmother’s grinder and I had a lot of different proposals [for other objects], but the one I felt needed to be there was the record player is the same from my parents’ house. I’d seen it all through my childhood and we found other record players that were wonderful and that worked, but they just did not feel right. It was one of those things you don’t know why, but they have a meaning, and I think also the way this record player came into the film is because I had grown up with it, so finding the right objects to tell the story was essential because they are not merely objects. There’s so much more.
I’m blown away thinking about the grinder in particular when it’s made clear that it’s the one of these items that the daughter (begrudgingly) accepts as an heirloom to give to her own children. What’s it like to let this film as a whole go out into the world?
Well, it feels it feels strange because when you carry a film like this — and it hasn’t been a long time because it all happened very quickly after “The Blue Caftan, but it’s been a very intense time — it was very beautiful, but very intense and then you reach this point where the film is finally going to meet the public and I can’t even describe it. I’m excited, but there’s a strange feeling. At the same time, you feel like you want to let go because it’s important to be able to let go. That’s also part of the process in general and on this film, I think even more particularly for me.
“Calle Malaga” opens on October 31st in Los Angeles for a one-week Oscar qualifying run at the Encino Town Center.