When it comes to the Oscars’ Best International Feature Film category, Moroccan writer-director Maryam Touzani has a remarkable track record. Over the last eight years, she has directed two of Morocco’s Oscar submissions, the first woman to direct the country’s entry in that race; she’s written three of the other five entries, all directed by her husband, Nabil Ayouch; and she’s also starred in one of them, Ayouch’s 2017 drama “Razzia.”
So even before Touzani’s new film, “Calle Malaga,” premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Friday, you’d be hard-pressed to bet against her landing another movie in the Oscar race. And once “Calle Malaga” screened in Venice, those odds probably got even better. The film takes a situation that could be milked for wrenching drama and outrage, an elderly woman whose daughter tries to sell her mother’s longtime home out from under her, and treats it with lightness and charm.
With the essential help of legendary Spanish actress Carmen Maura (“Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown,” “Volver”), Touzani creates an indelible character, has a lot of fun with her and makes a genuinely crowd-pleasing movie that somehow pulls back before it gets too cheery or too cheesy.
It’s lighter than you’d expect from the director whose last two films dealt with a terminally-ill woman facing the fact that her husband was gay (“The Blue Caftan”) and a widowed baker who takes in an unmarried pregnant woman (“Adam”). But Maura is close to irresistible, helping “Calle Malaga” to float when it could cloy.
Maura plays Maria Angeles, a Spanish-Moroccan widow living in Tangier in the home that her late husband bought for them years ago. An opening scene of her making her morning shopping rounds shows Maria as an integral part of a lively community, many of whose residents slip easily between Arabic and Spanish. (Touzani herself grew up there and is of Moroccan and Spanish descent.)
When her daughter arrives for a rare visit while in the midst of a nasty divorce, the young woman seems ill-at-ease until she finally drops the bomb. “I need some money, mama,” she says. “I’m going to sell the flat.”
“I thought it was a rental,” says Maria.
“I mean this flat.”
“You’re going to sell my house?”
And yes, that’s the plan, because the flat was put in the daughter’s name by Maria’s late husband, who wanted to make it easier on his wife in the event of his death. The daughter has two options for Maria: move to Madrid and live with her, or enter a retirement community in Tangier that has a single opening available if she moves right away.
Maria protests vehemently and then suddenly submits meekly; her daughter apparently doesn’t know her mom well enough to realize that’s something’s up, but even this early in the movie, we in the audience know it. Maria lives in the retirement community for a few days and then tells them that she’s decided to move to Madrid to be with her daughter. She signs herself out and her friend Mbarek comes to pick her up.
“Airport?” he asks when she puts her bags in the car.
“Are you pulling my leg?” she snaps. “You’re taking me home.”
And surprisingly, she pulls it off easily. The flat hasn’t sold yet, and Maria manages to get back in, buy back some of her furniture from the surly antiques dealer who gave her daughter a rock-bottom price for all of it. (She also blackmails the real-estate agent from revealing what she’s doing, but we won’t spoil the details of that one.)
The film sketches the vibrant life of the community, and Maria charms the audience as well as she charms the people around her. Even if we know that she can’t get away with it indefinitely, Touzani’s insistence on downplaying the trauma and emphasizing the joy (and even the romance, as that antiques dealer turns out to be not such a bastard after all) feels like a real statement: She’s going to take a 79-year-old woman in a desperate situation and turn her into a cheerful hero.
The role of a feisty elderly woman could easily become a mawkish cliché, but Maura underplays it and makes her touching but never maudlin. So the sweet moments come one after another, as Maria figures out a (not entirely legal) way to make money, overshares her sexual adventures with her best friend, who happens to be a nun, and to all appearances ignores the reckoning that must be coming when the apartment sells.
Of course she’s not really ignoring it, and neither is the audience. And even then, Touzani finds a way out of the story that is ambiguous but satisfying, and one that doesn’t betray either the character we love or the situation she’s in.
“Calle Malaga” is a delicate film to pull off, but Touzani and Maura find the right balance from the start. You don’t know that everything’s going to be OK at the end of the movie, but you know that everything’s been more than OK for the two hours you’ve been watching.
Read all of our Venice Film Festival coverage here.