Maryam Touzani’s Calle Málaga won the Audience Award at the Venice Film Festival’s new Spotlight Section, and the film is accordingly an audience-pleaser. Following her delicate depiction of a queer love triangle unsettling a longstanding marriage in The Blue Caftan, which was the first Moroccan film to be shortlisted for the International Feature Academy Award in 2022, Touzani’s new film is an equally sensitive character piece. A heartfelt, but not oversentimental, portrait of a septuagenarian woman reconnecting with her community and her desires, Calle Málaga is easy to embrace. The film contains vibrancy and poignancy in equal measure, and if reliant on familiar plot beats, Touzani is a sophisticated enough filmmaker to use the film’s occasional predictability to her advantage, providing an opportunity for a wide audience to engage with thoughtful ideas about diasporic communities, late-in-life sexuality, and contentious familial relationships within a comforting narrative frame.
A title card at Calle Málaga’s onset explains the cultural context of its setting, Tangier, a city in northern Morocco. A short distance from Spain, the city has long been a “melting pot” of cultures due to its location and its previous statuses as an international city, then Spanish protectorate, prior to Moroccan independence. A large Spanish population settled in Tangier in the 1930s at the onset of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship, and the film focuses on a descendant of this Spanish community who calls Tangier home.
María Angéles, played by the estimable Carmen Maura, is a woman in her 70s who has lived in the same flat in Tangier for 40 years. Widowed and with an adult daughter who lives in Spain, she spends much of her time alone, but has a close bond with her neighbors and takes clear pleasure in the simple tasks of daily life like shopping at the market, cooking, and listening to records. A sudden visit from her harried daughter, Clara (Marta Etura), upends her placid lifestyle. Clara is a healthcare worker with two children who is struggling financially amid a contentious divorce. Her father left the flat María Angéles still lives in to Clara upon his death, and so Clara decides to sell it against María Angéles’ wishes in order to purchase a flat of her own. Unwilling to move to Madrid with Clara, María Angéles briefly stays in a local retirement home, but cannot withstand the circumscribed lifestyle enforced there. Set on living her life to the fullest no matter the limits of her circumstances, she makes a hasty return home without Clara’s knowledge, starts buying back her furniture, and hides whenever a realtor shows the flat to prospective buyers.
The film revolves around María Angéles’ personal development as she adapts to her precarious new circumstances, and Maura fills the role with an unassuming, yet compelling depth. Touzani lingers on her face in numerous close-ups throughout the film, and Maura, best known in the United States for her roles in several Pedro Almodóvar films, expresses a deep internal life through the slightest of micro-expressions — for example, though María Angéles barely speaks to Clara after she learns of her plans to sell the flat, Maura communicates the suffocating disappointment she feels with silent, cutting clarity. Maura embodies a full range of emotions as María Angéles gains new experiences; she is boisterous when hosting an informal café for soccer fans in her apartment for extra cash, and sensual when falling into an affair for the antiques dealer (Ahmed Boulane) she has been buying her furniture back from. This relationship is the most affecting subplot in the film, handled with grace and refreshing eroticism. While the sexuality of older people is used as a punchline or, worse, a jump-scare in many other films, Touzani’s treatment of this subject matter is near-reverent, allowing Maura and Boulane to create a believable, appealing intimacy.
While María Angéles thrives after grabbing her last chance at an independent life, Clara does, of course, re-enter the narrative, forcing María Angéles to consider how to move forward, and Clara to take a closer look at her mother’s perspective. Through this contentious relationship, and how it plays out over the film, Touzani, herself a native of Tangier, sets up a pertinent conflict without an easy resolution. Clara does not share María Angéles’ devotion to her home city, and she does not comprehend why her mother stays in a city with few surviving friends, rather than move to Madrid with her. The mother and daughter stand in for a broader generational conflict between longstanding community roots and immediate economic need, and María Angéles and Clara’s polar perspectives cannot be simply reconciled. Touzani, though, creates a wealth of sympathy and understanding for María Angéles’ position, and in doing so paints a touching portrait of a dwindling diasporic community. As much a personal tribute to Touzani’s home city as it is an affecting showcase for Carmen Maura, Calle Málaga satisfies on both levels.
Published as part of TIFF 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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