To age is to find one’s appreciation for life’s daily joys sharpen, especially as more inconvenient realities assert themselves. Lifelong Tangier resident Maria Angeles (Carmen Maura), part of the bustling Moroccan city’s entrenched Spanish community, is one such grateful senior. We see her at the beginning of “Calle Málaga” in a state of smiling contentment, walking her neighborhood streets and being greeted by vendors.
What she surely isn’t expecting, however, as she buys food and makes croquetas in preparation for an eagerly awaited visit from her daughter from Madrid, is that this trip will threaten all she holds dear. That’s because Clara (Marta Etura), a divorced mom struggling to pay the bills, arrives with the news that she’s selling the grand old apartment her widowed mother has lived in for 40 years. Won’t it be nicer for Maria to live with her in Spain and be closer to her grandchildren? Or at the very least be taken care of locally in Spanish-specialized assisted living?
The look on Maura’s face — this celebrated actor’s most well-honed tool — suggests a range of emotions regarding forced elderhood or grannydom that are far less accommodating.
How Maria handles her imminent uprooting is at the core of Moroccan filmmaker Maryam Touzani’s third feature, her follow-up to the similarly sensitive family drama “The Blue Caftan.” “Calle Málaga,” written with Touzani’s husband Nabil Ayouch, is not a passive narrative, though, merely content with the internalized ache of acceptance. It is to some extent an emotional heist film and protest tale in delicate harmony, in that after initially agreeing to be placed in that Tangier senior center while her possessions are boxed up or sold, Maria schemes to steal her life back from under her absent daughter’s nose.
If you don’t look too closely at the details of Touzani’s charming scenario — which requires that a lot of things to fall into place, if enjoyably so — the movie becomes a sweet and spicy counternarrative to stories about aging that patronize their protagonists. (Another noteworthy example was last year’s rapturous American indie “Familiar Touch.”) Maria essentially becomes a crafty squatter in her own up-for-sale apartment, reclaiming some items from a hard-nosed but increasingly understanding antiques dealer (a well-cast Ahmed Boulane) and engineering a clever way to earn money with the help of friendly neighborhood kids who adore her. Her gambit even opens the door for unexpected romance, giving her frequent chats with Josefa (María Alfonsa Rosso), a childhood friend, an increasingly eye-opening frankness.
It’s hard to imagine anyone other than Maura, her almond-shaped eyes as powerfully suggestive as ever, conveying Maria’s rejuvenated spirit and sensuality with as much magnetism. Touzani, an unfussy, patient director with a fondness for the simplicity of human interaction, implicitly trusts her star to carry the film’s effervescence and complexity, although you may wish the filmmaking was a little less straightforward.
There is, after all, a reckoning for Maria’s situation we can’t help but keep in the back of our mind. Because our first brief glimpse of Clara is a sympathetic one — as opposed to conveniently antagonistic — we know “Calle Málaga” won’t settle for a tidy resolution. And it doesn’t, save leaving us with a view of Maria’s bid for freedom that, like the rose petal that is one of Touzani’s go-to visuals, beautifies the air whether still connected to the roots or separated and strewn like so much that’s fragile in life.
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