‘Calle Malaga’ review: Carmen Maura stars in Maryam Touzani’s tame Tangier-set domestic drama

Dir: Maryam Touzani. Morocco/France/Spain/Germany/Belgium. 2025. 116mins

A woman well past retirement age doesn’t want to leave her house in Tangier even though her daughter – who lives with her family in Spain – is selling it. Calle Málaga, the Spanish-language debut from Moroccan filmmaker Maryam Touzani, is partially inspired by the director’s own Spanish-speaking grandmother, and is a bright, light confection about resilience and joie de vivre into old(er) age that’s as predictable as it is disposable.

There is hardly a sense of any life existing beyond the frame

Audiences who appreciated the storytelling complexity of her previous feature, The Blue Caftan, which premiered in Cannes Un Certain Regard in 2022 and won the Fipresci Prize, may be disappointed, though undiscriminating older audiences might still bite. Premiering in Venice Spotlight, the film will bow theatrically in France and Spain in early 2026.

Who else but Carmen Maura, former chica Almodóvar (Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Volver) and reigning eminence grise of Spanish cinema, could play Maria Angeles, a woman of Spanish origins who has lived in Tangier for almost 80 years. Though her husband has long since passed and her 40-something daughter Clara (Marta Etura) works and has her own family in Madrid, Maria has not ever considered leaving her city. So it comes as a blow when Clara informs her that she wants to sell the Tangier apartment on Calle Malaga – which is in Clara’s name – because she’s in the middle of a divorce and can’t live on her meagre nurse salary back in Spain. 

Forced out of her apartment and into a local old people’s home a little too easily to be believable, Maria finds a way out as soon as her daughter has returned home to Spain. She simply moves back into her old flat, even though it has been emptied and is up for sale. She strikes a deal with local antiques dealer Abslam (actor and director Ahmed Boulane, the enfant terrible of Moroccan cinema cast against type as a wise old man) to buy her old furniture back piecemeal. 

Where all this is going is not very surprising plot-wise, which wouldn’t be such an issue if the characters were well-drawn and the film offered some context. But instead we only get the skimpiest of outlines. In several scenes, Maria confesses what’s on her mind to a gray-haired girlfriend who has become a silent nun, though even these scenes feel more like a screenwriter’s trick to avoid a voice-over rather than an organic shortcut to Maria’s innermost thoughts. Co-screenwriters Touzani and her filmmaker husband Nabil Ayouch also co-wrote The Blue Caftan but, unlike that work, here there is hardly a sense of any life existing beyond the frame, or any kind of revelatory personal transformation for any of the characters.

This seems especially odd given that the story of someone belonging to the Spanish-speaking community in northern Africa would seem rich with possibilities for a wider socio-historical context, and the different ways of thinking and living that exist in a character like Maria. Instead, the film offers a handful of clichés about ageing and Moroccan supporting characters whose Spanish, for the most part, sounds over-rehearsed and unnatural. Even its relatively daring take, for a Moroccan film, on older people’s sexual needs feels unsurprising and tame. (Particularly as Ayouch directed frank 2015 prostitution drama Much Loved together, which was banned in Morocco).

The sun-dappled cinematography by Belgian cinematographer Virginie Surdej, another Blue Caftan alumnus, looks gorgeous but too painterly to fit with the otherwise more natural vibe of the material. At least it doesn’t feel as schmaltzy as Freya Arde’s score, which is thankfully kept to a minimum.