Every great movie, just like every alluring woman, keeps secrets that are never fully revealed — and this holds for both Maryam Touzani’s most recent film, Calle Málaga, and its flamboyant protagonist, María Ángeles, portrayed by Spanish cinema icon Carmen Maura.
The film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival — where it won the Audience Award in the Spotlight category of the official selection — along with its subsequent selection as Morocco’s official candidate for the upcoming Oscars race, coincides with Maura’s 80th birthday. A festive context that aligns perfectly with the overall atmosphere of Calle Málaga, which, above all, is a celebration of life.
And this is just one of the many layers stacked in this rich, juicy, and entertaining œuvre — one also profoundly rooted in the history and morals of the past century; layers we will peel back one by one.
Approaching her 80s, the high-spirited Spaniard María Ángeles lives in the vibrant — almost visually aromatic — old centre of Tangier, in a cosy flat with high ceilings, antique dark mahogany furniture, and touches of Oriental exoticism in the décor.
She is alone but never lonely — her daily walks through the winding souks, lined with spice-laden stalls, and the neighbourly chatter along the way make up her quiet but constant social life.
Meanwhile, in the private world of her home, she finds company in her gramophone, crackling with bolero and flamenco rhythms, and in the flowers on her balcony, which she tends to with tender, almost ritual care.
All this serene happiness is suddenly shattered by the arrival of her daughter from Madrid — not simply to check in on her beloved mother, but to sell the flat, which has been legally hers since her late father’s passing, driven by financial desperation.
María Ángeles’s smile fades in an instant — but not the flame in her eyes. She’s ready to fight for her place in the land where her ancestors are buried, and where she still feels she belongs.
Life path soaked into genes
Having had a Spanish grandmother herself, Maryam Touzani says her urge to make the film was “born out of a deep need to reconnect with my memories, explore them, and bring them back to life,” as she explains in her Director’s Statement.
When she was little, her Spanish grandmother was already living with her parents in Tangier, where she had moved as a young woman for good — like many Spaniards — and never imagined leaving the city she loved.
Growing up, Maryam watched her grandmother’s friends, who represented a fading Spanish community, struggle to hold on as the city changed around them.
Namely, those sweet memories she tried to grasp and recreate on screen. Perhaps for this reason, the Tangierian imagery in Calle Málaga evokes a strong sense of domesticity, togetherness, and communal life.
In a globalised world of constant movement, where the feelings of rootedness and home have become problematic notions, María Ángeles, a character likely inspired by Maryam Touzani’s grandmother, clings to a deep sense of belonging and fights to defend her private place in this land at any cost.
Her daughter doesn’t understand what keeps her in Morocco, but the memories of María Ángeles’s life journey in the Maghreb, which outweigh her European origins, have settled deep within her genetic code.
Post-colonial nostalgia
And indeed, how did María Ángeles end up here? The film remains mysteriously laconic on this question, inviting us to dig into the historical layer whose indirect metanarrative surrounds the film like a halo.
А brief search would bring us to the history of the Spanish Protectorate in Morocco, which was established in 1912 and was functioning until the country gained independence in 1956.
Though Tangier was formally excluded from this influence zone by receiving a special internationally controlled status as Tangier International Zone, it naturally became home to many Spaniards, who occupied comfortable positions in the administration of the protectorate.
It’s not hard to imagine that the figures of María Ángeles and her late husband represent in Calle Málaga descendants of families with a similar colonial stature — an inheritance that granted them the aristocratic high-ceilinged apartment and allowed her to be stay home mum who worked only briefly, and only for pleasure — at the box office of the legendary Gran Teatro Cervantes, a cornerstone of the Spanish community in Tangier.
A fate that her daughter, a typical contemporary overworked woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, could not repeat in post-colonial Spain.
Emotionally drained by a bitter divorce and unable to cope with pennylessness on her meager nurse’s salary in a collapsing welfare state, she sees no other option but to evict her mother offering her the innaceptable option to go live in Madrid — or send her to the retirement home of the Spanish community in Tangier, which, perhaps still living off colonial money, remains free of charge.
We don’t often see the Maghreb portrayed on screen as more desirable than Europe — but here, in the contrast between two realities embodied by mother and daughter, Tangier appears cheerful, inviting, and peaceful, a stark counterpoint to the expensive, exhausting Madrid that stays offscreen.
The mother, oblivious to the world’s turbulence and more absorbed in her gramophone than in her grandchildren, glows with vitality on the cusp of her eighth decade. She belongs to the last generation to have directly enjoyed the comforts of the colonial order.
Her middle-aged daughter, emancipated yet frustrated, is a citizen of a Europe in crisis — with dwindling resources, left to fend for itself, and increasingly unable to survive without the remnants of its colonial inheritance.
It’s a clash of generations, morals, existential realms — colonial, post-colonial, and vice versa.
Lust for life
In this configuration, both women have the right to stand their ground, each shaped by her own experience and fate — the open ending speaks volumes.
Yet, the camera in Calle Málaga, while taking no explicit side, sticks closely to its elderly protagonist, intoxicated and enchanted by her fierce energy as she defends her personal space and the quiet grace of her life.
It’s a contagious determination, one with which she charms everyone around: the football fans she welcomes into her home, offering them a space to watch matches, along with tapas and beer — the profits from which she uses to buy back the furniture her daughter sold; the grumpy antique dealer who melts under the force of her resolve and, from a closed-off miser, transforms into her devoted lover.
And Carmen Maura is a spellbinding diva — seductive even with natural white hair, even as she shyly confesses her spicy affair to her trusted nun.
Her María Ángeles convinces us that this rediscovery by Maryam Touzani signals the beginning of a whole new chapter in her career — one that’s still to come.
Mariana Hristova is a freelance film critic, cultural journalist, and programmer. She contributes to national and international outlets and has curated programs for Filmoteca de Catalunya, Arxiu Xènctric, and goEast Wiesbaden, among others. Her professional interests include cinema from the European peripheries and archival and amateur films