“Malaga Street“Opens with title cards that explain to the audience The story of Tanger’s Spanish population: How, when Spain fell to fascism during Francisco Franco’s rule in the 1930s fled to the northwestern Moroccan city, and a community of Spanish speakers bloomed and grew over decades. Already tell the audience.
By getting through the streets in their neighborhood, shopping for groceries and warm health their neighbors, Maura makes it obvious that Maria loves her silent, content life in this city where she grew up. And when Maria’s daughter Clara (Marta Etura) arrives to release a bomb shell – that she needs to sell the family’s home, and Maria must either bring her to Madrid or live for the rest of her life in a nurse – how Maura’s face blinks from devastation and fear of anger and steel makes it too clear how difficult she will struggle to maintain this life.
The third function of director Maryam Touzani, “Calle Malaga” beats chords similar to her acclaimed second feature “The Blue Caftan” in her exploration of the romantic, domestic life of someone far past the middle age. Touzani -based the nature of Maria partly on her own Spanish grandmother, and she gives Maura – a great actress who is best known to American audience for her work in Pedro Almodóvar such as “Women on the verge of a nervous breakdown” and “Volver” – a wonderful part to embody. Mary is a wonderfully structured character, in turns flint and cold and lively and fun, and Maura is skilled at the embody of all sides to this woman. But the movie around her turns out much less interesting than its main character. Often certainly and just shady the surface of the complicated feelings that its conditions raise, “Calle Malaga” is like but never really interesting.
Warm shot with sun drinked lenses of Virginie Surdej and sound traced by an excessive sentimental point by Freya Arde, “Calle Malaga” introduces the threat to Maria’s house as a tragedy before he quickly turns to a more happy, sentimental story, one where the woman finds society and even loves through the hardship. Maria, Crafty and Resistant, agrees to go to the pension center and let Clara put the house on the market and return to her family in Madrid. With her daughter from her back, she falsifies a trip to see her to leave the middle and goes back to push in her unexpected former home, and eventually collaborate with a young neighbor to host football -viewing parties in space as a way to scrape up money. It also helps her to buy back her old furniture from stylish antiques retailer Abbram (Ahmed Boulane), with which she sparkles a tentative romance.
The romantic sub -plot proves the most charming thread “Calle Malaga” has to offer, thanks to Maura and Boulane’s performances. There is a boring sense of longing between them even before things are explicitly romantic and for a relatively tame and windy film It really gets hot in their depiction of their relationship. In other areas, however, the script from Touzani and her husband and producer Nabil Ayouch falter in the way it fills out the people surrounding Maria. Her best friend Josefena (María Alfonsa Rosso), a nun who has made a promise of silence, is more a unit through which Mary can spy his feelings and inner thoughts than a completely formed person. Sometimes their interactions work for fun effect, such as when she eradicates Abslama’s performance in bed to her silent friend, but the film stumbles as it tries to build real emotional efforts around their band.
Going even worse is Clara, thinly made as a grateful child and an obstacle to her mother. Although she is introduced for very valid reasons to sell the apartment – she just underwent a divorce, she fights financially, she needs money to buy a new home for her children – “Calle Malaga” has little interest in giving her real interior or taking her concerns seriously. Her strained relationship with her mother has little shade, and the unsatisfactory, sudden end that leaves the two still in battle turns curious for an otherwise gentle film.
Lack of nuance plague “Calle Malaga” in general, and it is especially obvious in how the thin neighborhood Maria loves so dear is actually on the screen. Cobblestone Step streets are comfortable on the eye, but the people who live in this society and rally to help Maria do not have much character to talk about. There is little sense of what her life in this city, like a Spanish woman around mostly Moroccans, looks like. Despite the film’s introductory text, most of “Calle Malaga” can happen in any city in the world. Without Maura’s performance, there would be no specificity to talk about.
Rating: C+
“Calle Malaga” premiered at the Venice Film Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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