Calle Málaga (2025)
Maryam Touzani opens her Spanish-language debut by asking whether a 79-year-old woman’s refusal to leave her home deserves to be taken seriously as a political act. She then spends most of the film’s 116 minutes suggesting the answer is yes — while quietly declining to make the argument in full.
María Ángeles (Carmen Maura) is a Spaniard living alone in Tangier, Morocco, where she has spent the better part of her adult life. Her days are unhurried, pleasurable, and woven into the rhythms of her neighbourhood — the café where she is known by name, the market stalls, the long-standing friendships she has cultivated over decades. That contented existence is upended when her daughter Clara (Marta Etura) arrives from Madrid with news that she intends to sell the apartment — which she, legally, owns. María Ángeles has no intention of going quietly, and her resistance forms the spine of what follows.
Touzani and co-writer Nabil Ayouch are more comfortable inside María Ángeles’s daily routines than inside the conflict that threatens them — and the first act reflects that comfort, settling into neighbourhood life with a patience that means the film has to work to locate its plot when Clara finally arrives. The warmth Touzani brings to the Tangier streetscapes functions as insulation, keeping the drama at a temperature where nobody is ever really at risk.
Maura’s performance is built on a refusal of sympathy as a tool. She keeps María Ángeles’s sharper edges intact — the self-centredness, the selective memory, the cheerful manipulation — and the character is harder to dismiss for it. When something finally costs her, it registers. Touzani keeps the camera close and lets the face do the arguing.
The screenplay does not match the performance. Clara is allocated a financial crisis and a sour manner, but the script shows no real curiosity about what produced either. Somewhere behind the property dispute is a mother who made choices her daughter is still paying for — the film knows this, raises it once, and moves on. A film willing to press that history would have been a different and more uncomfortable kind of arthouse drama; Calle Málaga prefers its warmth to that discomfort. The secondary romantic strand is the same problem in miniature: it introduces a question — can desire survive the indignities of age? — and then walks away from it before an answer becomes obligatory.
Virginie Surdej’s cinematography gives Tangier’s historic centre the kind of material specificity that earns the film’s central argument rather than merely decorating it — the light on plaster walls, the density of a crowded market, the particular quality of an apartment that has absorbed forty years of one person’s choices. The supporting cast of shopkeepers, neighbours and café regulars brings an unforced familiarity that gives María Ángeles’s world a social density that her scenes with Clara — two people performing estrangement rather than living it — conspicuously lack.
The ending arrives abruptly and parks in ambiguity the film has not prepared for. The closing scene needs the Clara strand, the mother’s history, and the romantic subplot to have been pressed hard enough to leave something unresolved and charged — instead they have been managed so carefully that nothing is left to detonate. Touzani has made a film that is easier to sit with than to think about afterwards. Maura has made something harder to shake — and sitting with both at once is what Calle Málaga offers and what it withholds.