Review: “Calle Málaga” – A 70-something heroine in Tangier

This review was originally published with The Alliance of Women Film Journalists

Calle Málaga is a warm and surprising tale about aging, family and sense of place. Veteran Carmen Maura stars as an elderly Spanish woman, raised as part of an immigrant community in Tangier, Morocco, who steadfastly refuses to spend her sunset years doing anything other than living the life she desires. She is a quiet yet determined 70-something heroine. Tangier-born director Maryam Touzani, who co-wrote the script with regular collaborator (and husband) Nabil Ayouch, has constructed a nuanced and sensitive film that infuses its story, star and setting with layers of meaning. 

It’s a cliché that people often treat older women as invisible. In Calle Málaga, Maura’s María Angeles makes invisibility an asset. It allows her to covertly move back into her empty apartment after her daughter, Clara (Marta Etura), forces her to put it on the market and sell off her things. It permits her to skirt the law and mount a makeshift speakeasy, earning enough money to slowly buy her furniture back. It lets her embark on a passionate affair in the privacy of her own space.

In her refusal to leave Tangier and move to Madrid with Clara, María Angeles shows she knows her place and values her heritage there. In Moroccan society, as Touzani gently suggests, that also means knowing how to maneuver within male-dominant public spaces. María Angeles has friendly relations with all the local shopkeepers, police officers and young men on street corners, who happily extend her tabs, run her errands or even turn a blind eye on her legal evasions. Here she’s not invisible, but the strings she pulls are.

She nods knowingly at the matronly lady on an adjacent balcony and relies on female neighbors for help with her affairs; the women control what goes on inside. Like her best childhood friend, nun Josefa (María Alfonso Rosso), who lives in a cloistered convent and keeps a vow of silence, and who may end up having enjoyed the most freedom of all – in full control of her environment and even her own thoughts.

But men aren’t the bad guys in Calle Málaga. When antiques dealer Abslam (Ahmed Boulane) finds himself drawn by María Angeles’ quiet determination, the two embark on a tender affair. He dotes on her needs, physical and emotional, in a way that surprises her after a lifetime of a comfortable but passionless marriage. Touzani captures the pair naked, slowly swaying to music, each savoring the touch of the other’s body.

If there’s an antagonist in this story, it’s daughter Clara, whose inability to manage her own life leads her to nearly deflate her mother’s full one. But Touzani crafts Clara as a character to be pitied, not feared, a sad contrast to María Angeles’ vitality and sense of self. Dressed in drab colors, her straight hair tugging down her makeup-less features, Clara is a middle-aged mom reeling from a nasty divorce, denying herself dessert and scrambling as life passes her by. Lacking her mother’s pluck, she weeps at her plight but is seemingly incapable of changing it. 

Clara's dourness colors the film’s grayer first act. It’s not until she leaves town, and María Angeles breaks out of the stifling senior residency where Clara has placed her, that the film – which won the Audience Award in the Spotlight section at last fall’s Venice Film Festival and was selected to represent Morocco in the International Oscar race (and will open the Málaga Film Festival in March) – really finds its rhythm. Maura’s charming performance is at the core.

Through it all, María Angeles keeps her nails painted an impeccable red, one of several touches of symbolic coloring Touzani and DP Virginie Surdej keep coming back to. They convey her unyielding passion in scarlet nails and lips, clothing and décor. The ruby flowers she nurtures on her balcony and sprinkles as a romantic gesture for Abslam suggest her ability to blossom where planted. And when she leaves roses on family members’ tombstones, including one she pieces back together after it’s shattered, we understand her determination to stand her ground.

If the damask rose is Morocco’s national flower, Touzani’s María Angeles may be the unofficial mascot of the Spaniards who have made Tangier their permanent home.  

Images courtesy of Strand Releasing