“Calle Malaga” opens with title cards explaining to the audience the history of Tangier’s Spanish population: How, as Spain fell to fascism under Francisco Franco’s rule in the 1930s people fled to the Northwest Moroccan city, and a community of Spanish speakers blossomed and grew over the decades. It’s an overly didactic touch that conveys little beyond what Carmen Maura’s performance as Maria, an elderly woman living alone in Tangier, already tells the audience.
Making her way through the streets of her neighborhood, shopping for groceries and warmly greeting her neighbors, Maura makes it obvious that Maria adores her quiet, content life in this city where she grew up. And, when Maria’s daughter Clara (Marta Etura) arrives to drop a bombshell — that she needs to sell the family home, and Maria must either come with her to Madrid or live the remainder of her life in a nursing community — the way Maura’s face flashes from devastation and horror to anger and steel makes it all too clear how hard she’ll fight to maintain this life.
The third feature of director Maryam Touzani, “Calle Malaga” strikes chords similar to her acclaimed sophomore feature “The Blue Caftan” in its exploration of the romantic, domestic life of someone well past middle-age. Touzani based the character of Maria in part on her own Spanish grandmother, and she gives Maura — a great actress best known to American audiences for her work in Pedro Almodóvar movies like “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” and “Volver” — a wonderful part to embody. Maria is a wonderfully textured character, at turns flinty and cold and vivacious and funny, and Maura is adept at embodying all sides to this woman. However, the movie around her proves a lot less interesting than it’s main character. Frequently safe and only skimming the surface of the complicated emotions its premise raises, “Calle Malaga” is likable but never quite interesting.
Warmly shot with sun-draped lenses by Virginie Surdej and soundtracked by an overbearingly sentimental score by Freya Arde, “Calle Malaga” introduces the threat on Maria’s house as a tragedy before quickly pivoting to a more cheery, sentimental story, one in which the woman finds community and even love through the hardship. Crafty and resistant, Maria agrees to go to the retirement center and let Clara put the house on the market and return to her family in Madrid. With her daughter off her back, she fakes a trip to see her to leave the center and heads back to squat in her unoccupied former home, eventually teaming up with a young neighbor to host football-viewing parties in the space as a way to scrounge up money. It also helps her buy back her old furniture from handsome antiques dealer Abslam (Ahmed Boulane), with whom she sparks a tentative romance.
The romantic subplot proves the most charming thread “Calle Malaga” has to offer, thanks to Maura and Boulane’s performances. There’s a wistful sense of longing between them even before things turn explicitly romantic, and for a relatively tame and breezy film it does get genuinely hot in its depiction of their relationship. In other areas, however, the script from Touzani and her husband and producer Nabil Ayouch falters in the way it fills out the people surrounding Maria. Her best friend Josefena (María Alfonsa Rosso), a nun who has taken a vow of silence, is more a device through which Maria can spew her feelings and inner thoughts than a fully-formed person. Occasionally their interactions work to funny effect, like when she extolls Abslam’s performance in bed to her silent friend, but the film stumbles when it tries to build real emotional stakes around their bond.
Faring even worse is Clara, thinly rendered as an ungrateful child and an obstacle for her mother. Although she’s introduced with very valid reasons for selling the apartment — she just went through a divorce, she’s struggling financially, she needs the money to buy a new home for her kids — “Calle Malaga” has little interest in giving her real interiority or taking her concerns seriously. Her strained relationship with her mother has little nuance, and the unsatisfying, abrupt ending that leaves the two still at odds proves curiously sour for an otherwise gentle movie.
Lack of nuance plagues “Calle Malaga” in general, and it’s particularly apparent in how thin the neighborhood Maria loves so dearly actually is on screen. The cobblestone step streets are pleasing on the eye, but the people who inhabit this community and rally to help Maria don’t have much character to speak of. There’s little sense of what her life in this city, as a Spanish woman around mostly Moroccans, looks like. Despite the film’s introductory text, most of “Calle Malaga” could happen in any city in the world. Without Maura’s performance, there’d be no specificity to speak of.
Grade: C+
“Calle Malaga” premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.
Want to stay up to date on IndieWire’s film reviews and critical thoughts? Subscribe here to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings — all only available to subscribers.
