CALLE MALAGA

Watch The Trailer

Storyline (warning: spoilers)

It can be hard to leave one’s home, but it’s even worse when it’s done against one’s will. That’s the predicament facing Maria Angeles (Carmen Maura), the gentle but determined protagonist of Maryam Touzani’s tender drama Calle Málaga. Maria is a life-long resident of Tangier, Morocco, where a Spanish community settled in the wake of Franco’s dictatorship. In her late 70s, she has her routine, a close confidante in a nun named Josefa (Maria Alfonsa Rosso), and friendly neighbours who know her well. When her daughter Clara (Marta Etura) arrives for a whirlwind visit from Spain, she tells her mother that she is selling the family’s long-held flat to buy a new home outside Madrid for her and her kids, inviting her mother to live with them. It is more of a demand than an offer, and Maria has no intention of moving to Spain.
At various points through Clara’s tumultuous visit home, she seems wilfully ignorant of the many ties Maria holds to this place, looking past the many faces who greet her and her mother, or forgetting that her father’s grave is a place Maria still likes to visit. It’s possible she’s so selfishly motivated in her own distress (she’s trying to bounce back from a divorce) that she can only see her own pain and not that of her mother.
Maria only rarely shows her horns when the impositions become too overbearing. At the senior home, Clara tries to move her to, Maria dismisses the two hairdressers who insist on cutting her long hair short for easier upkeep with a snappy put-down. Yet, when Maria strikes up a connection with Absalom (Ahmed Boulane), the antiques dealer who sold her things, Maura shows a softer side of her character, one that’s giddy with the possibility of romance and practically melts on his arm when he successfully negotiates the return of her record player. New love can find a person at any age. That excitement does not make leaving one’s home any easier. Despite the warmth that runs throughout much of Calle Málaga, there’s also an anxious undercurrent that Maria’s newfound life in the city is on borrowed time.