Spanish actress Carmen Moura has always had a mischievous presence on the cinema screen, whether that be in Pedro Almodóvar melodramas such as Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown or Volver, there is an indefatigable aspect of a depiction of feminine determination not to be constrained by rigid social mores.
Decades on from those landmark performances, the 80-year old actor teams up with Moroccan film maker Maryam Touzani to produce a narrative focused in the Spanish district of Tangiers that explores an often-overlooked aspect of the aging process.
This sees Moura portray Maria Angeles, a septuagenarian whose life is connected to her street and her home, which is about to sold from beneath her by her daughter Clara who like many with young families is struggling to afford the cost of living back in Spain.
This film presents the fears many people have about the aging process, with the expectation that once one hits your golden years your role in society is reduced as friends and partners depart. And in this film, with Maria’s house on the market and her daughter back in Spain, she is sent to convalesce in a nursing home.
Such a sense of entrapment has been explored in some other narratives, probably best encapsulated in Elizabeth Jolley’s Mr Scobies Riddle, and films such A Man Called Ove and The Great Escaper have looked at the plight of older people losing their independence and look at how they try to challenge this situation.
The narrative of this is greatly helped by the Moura’s ability to conjure this character that refuses to be compliant in her various schemes to resist the efforts to contain her in an environment where she is unable to interact with the world. But Maria breaks-out and returns to her former home on Calle Malagna and continues her life, showing she will not be dragged into the monotonous routine of the nursing home, instead finding a surprising sensuous encounter with an antiques dealer.
This story continues Maryam Touzani’s exploration of life’s often invisible characters in Morocco, her attention for detail in this film again makes the
depiction of the most European of Morocco’s cities Tangier very evocative, describing the vibrancy of the local stalls that exist in the Spanish district among the extravagant streets with the elegant architecture of balconies in which the old and new interact, where the Barcelona-Real Madrid TB derby is screened from homes looking across the Mediterrean for hundreds of years.
However, while this story again explores a character trying to elude being contained by the social expectations, this film lacks the emotion punch of Touzani’s previous film The Blue Caftan that delicately described the discrete life of a closeted gay tailor who clandestinely obtains his sensual encounters in a way that does not lead him to come into conflict with the strict Islamic legal code of a nation which is anything from LBTQI friendly.
That said Touzani does have an adept ability to conjure up some unique moments, with some moments of playful humour with her conversations with Josefa, a nun who has taken a vow of silence, a wink and a nod to Almodóvar’s Dark Habits. Similar to The Blue Caftan the director has sketched her characters with sensitivity, but where her earlier film the relationship Halim had with his wife Mina is depicted with a gentle delicateness, in this film we don’t really gain much of an understanding of the characters beyond Maria which prevents this film from achieving the empathetic identification experienced in The Blue Caftan.
CALLE MALAGA gets its national release on April 16.
Image: Image courtesy of CALLE MALAGA
Produced By: Stephen Hill
First aired on The Wire, Wednesday 15 April 2026