The marvellous Carmen Maura plays Maria Angeles, a 79-year-old Spanish woman, living alone in Tangier, Morocco, enjoying her daily routine. However, her life is turned upside down when her daughter arrives from Madrid to sell the apartment in which she has always lived.
Her dear daughter, Clara, is in financial straits and thanks to a power of attorney bestowed on her courtesy of her deceased father, she has the authority to turf her mother out of the digs she has occupied for the better portion of her life.
Determined not to be undone by her duplicitous daughter, Maria does everything she can to stay and along the way picks up some strays!
Ay Caramba!
If octogenarian nudity and nookie is not your cup of tea, CALLE MALAGA is not for you.
If you consent, if you commit, you are in for a sensual consensual film fest.
CALLE MALAGA could be seen to stew in its screen time. The film makers would argue that the movie marinates. And Carmen Maura is cause to savour lingering moments as she shops the streets of Tangier for groceries, an easy camaraderie between her and the various merchants.
So, it is not just the apartment that her daughter is forcing her to give up but a whole community, a social life that sustains the biological and the psychological wellbeing.
Carmen’s Maria plays along with her daughter’s plan of relocating to a retirement village but finds this new environment cold, regimented and lifeless. She escapes and encamps herself back into her now vacant flat and proceeds to buy back the furniture she has sold.
She also hatches a plan to generate a liveable income accommodating football fans with home cooked treats as they watch games congregated in her living room.
Through these enterprises, Maria not only maintains her sense of community but a greater sense of self as romance is kindled from an unlikely source, and a long dormant libido is unleashed.
An endearing device in the film is Maria’s visits to a convent. Here she has the ear of a nun vowed to silence who she can confide and confess all her adventures and misadventures.
Maryam Touzani’ s follow up film to The Blue Caftan, CALLE MALAGA is a tender love letter to Tangier and a testament to the endurance and wisdom of our elders.
