Maryam Touzani’s “Calle Malaga,” playing at New York City’s Film Forum, is set in Tangier, a Moroccan city located on the northwestern coasts of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. It is a polyglot city inhabited by many different nationalities, including a large Spanish population that left Spain during Franco’s regime.
The film’s central figure, Marie Angeles (Carmen Maura, whom I remember from her arresting performances in Pedro Almodóvar’s films), is a seemingly gentle, warm Spanish widow in her 70s who is a life-long resident of the city.
Despite her seemingly gentle demeanor, however, she can also use profanity when necessary and is tough and determined underneath. The film’s great virtue lies in Maura’s performance, as she indefatigably tries to cope with her flat being sold by her profoundly unhappy divorced daughter Clara (Marta Etura), who lives in Madrid and has money problems. The film barely renders who Clara is, which would have made the dynamic between her and Marie more dramatically complex and interesting. She is essentially used as a plot device, not a character with an interior life.
The film does make us understand how important the flat and city are to Marie, by observing her shopping in neighborhood stores, greeting storeowners and neighbors, and visiting her husband’s grave.
The city is often seen in long shots, strikingly overlooking the Mediterranean. But more could have been done with the camera to explore the way a city as vital as Tangier is structured. And despite her supposed deep ties to the community, Marie has only one confidante: a nun who has taken the vow of silence and just nods sympathetically as Marie vents. The scenes are slightly comic but also feel contrived.
Despite its flaws, however, Maura is able to carry the film and make it much more than a sentimental, heartwarming work about a feisty old woman. Maura captures all of Marie’s many dimensions—her warmth, animation, radiance (her smile), shrewdness, hardness, and sexual desire and pleasure.
Marie rejects staying in a tightly scheduled senior home, wanting a life of greater independence. And though she was never involved in running a business, she heads back to squat in her unoccupied former flat, eventually teaming up with a young neighbor to host and cook for football-viewing parties to make some money. The money also helps her buy back her old furniture from an antiques dealer, Abslam (Ahmed Boulane), with whom she has a romantic and sexual affair.
The affair is handled without self-consciousness and with no false notes. The film does not offer a simple happy ending, but one feels that old age in Touzani’s work is not a dead end but offers all sorts of possibilities.
