‘Calle Málaga’ Review: Carmen Maura Shines in an Overstuffed Tangier Tale

Three or four movies in one—almost like an entire season of a TV series crammed into two hours—Calle Málaga tries to be many things at once and ends up being very few. In the screenplay by Maryam Touzani and Nabil Ayouch (also a director and Touzani’s husband), the film aims to function simultaneously as a family drama, a portrait of Tangier, a late-life love story, and a comedy about a mischievous grandmother. But aside from a handful of isolated moments—more tied to staging than to narrative construction—none of those strands ever fully come together.

At first, one might assume Calle Málaga will focus on María Angeles (Carmen Maura), a widowed Spanish woman born and raised in Tangier, Morocco—a place where many Spanish families fled during the Franco years, with some choosing to remain permanently—and her relationship to the neighborhood and community she calls home. But that quickly takes a back seat once the film pivots to her family troubles, beginning with the arrival of her daughter Clara (Marta Etura), who lives in Madrid. María Angeles eagerly awaits her, but Clara shows up in a foul mood. It soon becomes clear that she’s recently divorced, broke, and locked in conflict with her ex. With little room for negotiation, she drops the bombshell: María Angeles must sell her Málaga Street apartment so Clara can buy a place in Madrid, since she can no longer afford rent.

There’s no real conversation—nor much kindness—around this decision. Because Clara, whom the film portrays as something of a monster, legally owns the apartment, her mother has no choice but to comply. Clara proposes that María Angeles move in with her and the grandchildren in Madrid, but María Angeles refuses to leave her city, her neighborhood, her lifelong home and possessions. The only alternative is a retirement facility, which—conveniently—has just had a vacancy open up, and it’s free. She reluctantly agrees, though it’s obvious she hates the idea. Once she arrives at the pleasant home—where, aside from a few forced conflicts, she’s treated quite well—it becomes clear she wants out. So she lies her way out of the facility and sets off on a mission to reclaim her sold furniture and find a way back into her house before the looming sale goes through.

From there—barely a quarter into this two-hour film—Calle Málaga splinters again, morphing into a genial comedy about a resourceful grandmother hustling to make money, recover her belongings, and avoid abandoning her beloved home. At the same time, another entirely different movie starts to unfold, built around a somewhat unexpected romantic connection that develops between her and Abslam (Ahmed Boulane), the stern, seemingly ill-tempered furniture dealer who bought her things. But everything feels forced, shaped by screenwriting decisions rather than by narrative logic or psychological plausibility.

It’s a film full of conflicts imposed externally on its characters—the mother-daughter relationship being the most glaring example—and one that shifts tone every ten minutes, as though it were divided into bite-sized episodes handing off to one another: one comic, the next romantic, another dramatic, another borderline incomprehensible. At one point—don’t ask how—the film detours into a lengthy subplot about Spanish La Liga soccer matches. Eventually, it decides to reinvent itself as a romantic, even erotic drama between two septuagenarians, sidelining nearly everything else. By the time the central real estate conflict resurfaces, the movie no longer seems to know what to do with it—or how to integrate it back into the story.

The best thing Calle Málaga —Morocco’s submission for the International Feature Film Oscar— has to offer lies not in its plot but in the way Touzani frames and captures the face, and even the body, of Carmen Maura. In many scenes, the camera lingers on her eyes as María Angeles observes something—the street, her daughter, her home, her belongings—and there’s a sense of emotional truth there that the film’s narrative never quite achieves. That extends to the close-ups Touzani—director of The Blue Caftan—devotes to the great Spanish actress’s hands, even to her body. It’s true that these extended pauses only make an already overlong film feel longer, but they’re far more compelling—and more genuinely cinematic—than eighty percent of the plot mechanics the script forces its protagonist to endure.