Calle Malaga

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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Maryam Touzani (“The Blue Caftan”), an excellent filmmaker specializing in humanist drama, scores again with “Calle Malaga.” The film, immersively focused on its setting, is brisk, colorful and abundant in charm. The narrative has patience and easeful subtlety very like literature.

Maria Angeles (Carmen Maura) is an octogenarian living in her Moroccan home as she has done for 40 years. During a sudden visit, her daughter Clara (Marta Etura) informs Maria Angeles that she is selling the house due to financial concerns as well as demanding that Maria spend more time with her grandchildren.

Maria Angeles refuses.

First and foremost, this is a showcase for Maura who possesses both a sweet heart and an iron will in her role. There is also humor.

Maria Angeles gets the idea of making her home into a soccer bar once a week to raise money. One quickly learns that Maria Angeles can handle anything in front of her.

There is surprise in the character of Abslam (film director Ahmed Boulane) a taciturn antique dealer as well as a very slight hint of the sinister in Josefa (María Alfonsa Rosso) a head nun in a Tangier convent.

To the director’s great credit, Touzani fearlessly highlights Maura’s and Boulane’s older bodies engaged in making love. Pleasures of the flesh have no age limit. Joyfully with verve, revealing the child within the adult, Maria Angeles does not hold her risqué tongue.

Drama comes to the fore. Daughter is pitted against mother. The older generation may or may not get the last wink of satisfaction.

As in a whiff of visual aniseed, the audience is teased with a rare open-ended ending but the feeling that Maria Angeles has the upper hand through Eros and the joy of memory is clearly evident.

This is an extremely human, organic, and naturalistic film, brimming with verve. As a slice of life film, it has a unique and playful kind of stoicism showing its characters and the country of Morocco itself in a free and warm pomegranate-shaded light.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com