After her finely judged love-triangle drama The Blue Kaftan, Maryam Touzani returns to Australian screens with a warm but clear-eyed portrait of an elderly widow forced to fight for her independence when her apartment is sold out from under her.
Carmen Maura, a towering presence in Spanish cinema, plays Maria Angeles, a lifelong resident of Tangier’s Spanish quarter. After 40 years, the neighbourhood’s rhythms are second nature. That stability is abruptly stripped away when her daughter Clara (Marta Etura) – mid-divorce and buckling under Madrid rents – arrives with an ultimatum: relocate to Spain, a country Maria has never lived in, or move into a local nursing home.
She chooses the latter, but Touzani wastes little time exposing its suffocating routines. When an overbearing hairdresser insists on cutting her hair – whether she likes it or not – Maria walks out, returning to her now-empty flat and the life she refuses to relinquish.
Carmen Maura in Calle Malága
Living quietly as a squatter, she begins to rebuild, buying back her possessions piece by piece from a taciturn secondhand dealer, Abslam (Ahmed Boulane). But with prospective buyers traipsing through the apartment, her fragile foothold is constantly under threat.
Calle Málaga is a showcase for Maura, whose performance is rich in defiance and vulnerability. Touzani frames her as both relic and resistor – an older woman unwilling to be filed away and forgotten. The film’s sympathies are clear, but it avoids sentimentality, grounding its story in the economic and social pressures that make Maria’s predicament all too recognisable.
Maria’s solution to funding her clandestine life might strike as a little too cute – she reinvents her flat as a gathering place for football fans – but it doesn’t blunt the film’s emotional force. Anchored by Maura’s luminous presence and a strong supporting cast, Calle Málaga stands as an engaging, quietly pointed study of autonomy, ageing and belonging, and its enticingly filmed Moroccan locations make it well worth catching on the big screen.
Calle Málaga screens nationally from 16 April.
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