Carmen Maura plays an 80-year-old woman who has lived her entire life in Tangier, but is threatened with eviction from her flat by her own daughter, who wants to move her to Madrid.
We have a way of calling an experience “bittersweet” when it involves both sorrow and joy. Moroccan director Maryam Touzani has fashioned that idea into an explicit narrative method in her latest film Calle Málaga.
The title is from a street in Tangier, a Moroccan city right across from Spain near Gibraltar, which has become legendary for its vibrant mixture of cultures. Many Spanish people emigrated there after the fascist victory in the 1930s.
We meet an old woman, Maria Angeles, played by the veteran Spanish actress Carmen Maura, living in a spacious flat on Calle Málaga, in the midst of her plants and lovely antique furniture, including an old record player that she often dances to. Still alert at age 80, Maria loves to walk through the streets where all the neighbors and vendors know and respect her. We follow as she buys an assortment of vegetables and other delicious foods, cooking them later in her apartment.
She’s preparing for a visit from her daughter Carla, who lives in Madrid, and she lovingly greets her when she arrives. But Carla is obviously troubled. It takes a while for her to tell her mother what’s bothering her—an imminent divorce from her husband, and an alarming lack of funds. This leads to a painful scene: Maria’s late husband put the flat in his daughter’s name for some reason, and now Carla says she has no choice but to sell it and move Maria to live with her and her kids in Madrid. This is a sudden shock, inflicted with no warning. Maria was born in Tangier and refuses to move. But Carla offers only one alternative: putting her mother in an assisted living facility.
To lose one’s home is bad enough, but to have it taken so suddenly, and by one’s own child, is very hurtful. As we watch all of Maria’s precious belongings, filled with memories, being sold to the local junk dealer, Touzani really makes the experience of loss vivid, and this is helped enormously by Maura’s sensitive and understated performance. She is the magic ingredient that makes this film live.
The eventual move into the retirement place is especially bitter, given the contrast between the sterile and depressing old age home and the beauty that Maria knew in the home she had occupied all her life. Any one of us who’s seen a parent go through this will watch this part of the film with some distressing emotions.
But this is where the sweet part comes in. Maria, fed up with assisted living, decides on a reckless plan to get her place back, to regain her wonderful life. What does she do? I’ll keep that a secret for the sake of your enjoyment. I’ll only say that each step seems highly unlikely, and yet each succeeds, until not only has she rebounded, but gradually and shyly develops a romance with the junk dealer.
Touzani wants to show that people need and deserve love and sex even when they’re old, and no one could be more able to portray this than Carmen Maura. It’s all quite funny, sometimes hilarious, especially when Maria explains everything that’s going on to an old friend, a nun in a local convent who listens to Maria’s incredible stories without speaking, because (ha ha) she’s practicing a vow of silence.
Well, it seems like the film is indulging in a wish fulfillment fantasy. It’s like a happy dream in the middle of a tragedy, but that’s exactly the point, because of course the dream will end. In Calle Málaga we find that the inmost pleasures of the heart are what sustain us through our grief.
