DRAMA; 1hr 56min (Spanish with subtitles)
STARRING: Carmen Maura, Marta Etura, Ahmed Boulane
Crowd pleaser: Boulane and Maura
At a chic 79, widow Maria Angeles (Maura) is loving life in her snuggly apartment in the hubbub of Tangier’s Málaga Street, where effervescence is an everyday event. Maria’s own bubbly warmth draws everybody to her, with the notable exception of her frazzled daughter, Clara (Etura).
Visiting from Madrid after a year, mother-of-two Clara is testy and stressed by an acrimonious divorce and the pressures of her nursing job. She is also out of money and wastes barely any time announcing to her stunned mother that she will now be forced to sell Maria’s home of 40 years.
Initially thrilled to see her daughter, Maria turns like a cornered snake, which in fairness, anybody would: “How dare you come here after all this time and talk such nonsense?” Tangier is Maria’s lifelong home, and she has no intention of forsaking her corner of it. Unfortunately for her, the apartment is in Clara’s name. The place is to be packed up and appraised pronto (by Boulane’s foxy antiques dealer, Abslam, on whom it is wise to keep a weather eye), after which soul-sapping exercise, Maria will be off to an old folks’ home.
Most ladies of a certain age would be a done-and-dusted. But since this subversive jewel is the brainchild of The Blue Caftan’s Maryam Touzani, Maria refuses to go quietly. Her velvety resolve is the key to Touzani’s crazy windmill-tilter: in an actual, ageist world, Maria’s drive to reclaim her life — and spark a romance with that foxy appraiser — would derail without a trace. But in a world of What Ifs and Why Nots, the impossible is just a fork in the road with the gift of self belief.
