14/09/2022 - VENICE 2022: Fyzal Boulifa’s beautifully made second feature charts the divergent fortunes of a mother and her late-adolescent son in Morocco, who are forced into itinerant, unstable work

Aïcha Tebbae and Abdellah El Hajjouji in The Damned Don’t Cry

Young, breakthrough filmmakers typically announce their entry into the industry with a bit of fashionable pizazz: think Xavier Dolan or Julia Ducournau and their stylish, modish opening salvos. Fyzal Boulifa, a Brit of Moroccan descent who’s without doubt one of the best new domestic filmmakers, has a slightly different angle: on the basis of his fine new work, The Damned Don’t Cry [+see also:
trailer
film profile], and his powerful feature debut, Lynn + Lucy [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Fyzal Boulifa
film profile], he instead comes across as an old-fashioned, sturdy dramatist. His work doesn’t parade its own importance or take great pains to stun you with directorial flash; he gets the basics, or more so the essentials, absolutely right, whilst showcasing an almost Loachian way of capturing the diverse locales he sets his films in. His new feature premiered towards the end of Venice’s Giornate degli Autori, after which it will play in BFI London’s Official Competition in October.

The Damned Don’t Cry also joins a notable slew of new festival premieres this year, such as The Blue Caftan [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] and Joyland, which break new ground in their discussion and depiction of queerness in majority-Islamic countries. And beyond that topic, it is deeply concerned with sex work as an enforced professional pursuit, but never cakes it in a miserabilistic sense of self-pity: in the still-sternly traditional climes of contemporary, urban Morocco, it is simply the reality of life for Boulifa’s proletarian characters. And in another factor that highlights the classic dramaturgy of this filmmaker’s worldview, here the act of prostituting oneself can somehow also be a genuine, restorative route out of penury.

Even though mother Fatima-Zahra (Aïcha Tebbae) and her late-teenage son Selim (Abdellah El Hajjouji, both engaging first-time actors) are bound by blood and often the temporary security of a roof over their heads, their relationship has the nature of a co-dependent one, even if they can’t extricate themselves from it for the very reasons stated. Fatima-Zahra has historically been a sex worker in Casablanca, yet their latest travails lead them to a new life in Tangier, with Selim now of an appropriate age to start acting as a breadwinner. The “French co-production” nature of the film lightly drops into the frame, as Sébastien (Antoine Reinartz, who’s impressed in works by Robin Campillo and Olivier Assayas), a kind expat hotelier, employs Selim first as a home renovation labourer, then a trick, and then an almost hybrid house boy/live-in romantic partner.

Fatima-Zahra is wooed by the initially pleasant-seeming coach driver Moustapha (Moustapha Mokafih) – he ferried mother and son from Casablanca to Tangier, and gamely stays in touch. But his placid facade – finally promising some domestic stability – masks an authoritarian streak, also exacerbated by the further misogynistic impulse of his array of bigamous relationships. So, on paper, Boulifa, with his on-the-record influences of Pasolini and Fassbinder exhibiting further good taste, could be accused of dunking his characters in despair, saddling them like a cannily manipulative screenwriter with endless dramatic obstacles. Yet the clue is in the title: the damned don’t cry – life, self-preservation and the empathy that cinema at its best can provide go on, and the tears dry on their own, as Amy Winehouse once sang.

The Damned Don’t Cry is a co-production between France, Belgium and Morocco. It was produced by Vixens, and co-produced by Frakas Productions and Kasbah Films. Its international sales are overseen by Charades.

Photogallery 08/09/2022: Venice 2022 - The Damned Don't Cry

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Fyzal Boulifa, Abdellah El Hajjouji, Aicha Tebbae, Antoine Reinartz
© 2022 Fabrizio de Gennaro for Cineuropa - fadege.it, @fadege.it