Country: Morocco
Director: Fyzal Boulifa
Time: 1 hour and 50 minutes
Where Can I Get It: In select theaters, soon to streaming
“Don’t talk to me about self-respect. That’s something you tell yourself you got when you got nothing else...The only thing that counts is that stuff you take to the bank, that filthy buck that everybody sneers at, but slugs to get.” So says Joan Crawford in The Damned Don’t Cry (1950), the rags-to-riches Crawford vehicle from which Fyzal Boulifa’s magisterial work takes its name. Crawford’s line encapsulates much about the approach taken by Boulifa’s central characters—Fatima-Zahra and her son, Selim—to the world. They are strivers who have resigned themselves to routine movement and life under strict social codes, yet who dream of greater comforts and alternate possibilities. Part character study, part road movie, part examination of Morocco’s marginalized, Boulifa’s film explores the unfurling dynamic between mother and son as each navigate various transactional relationships (often, though not always, predicated on the disbursement of sex) in an attempt to find forms of emotional and financial stability.
In particular, The Damned Don’t Cry emerges a work interested in harnessing the melodrama’s conventions in order to explore forms of humanity and companionship within difficult circumstances. (Both central roles are played by non-professional actors who lend the work a verve and verisimilitude that helps the film transcend the most restrictive aspects of the conventions it aims to deploy.) Fatima-Zahra, a part-time sex worker and aging coquette distinguished by a seemingly boundless confidence in her ability to ply men with her charms and strength of personality—much to the chagrin of her son—has begun to recognize that she may soon age out of her profession and beauty. (The film remains uninterested in offering bromides that undermine this fairly bleak view of male-female relationships.) After a liaison with a client turns violent, she and Selim travel back to her hometown to see her family for the first time in years. The reception is decidedly cool—her family represents a more conservative countryside that Fatima-Zahra has long since abandoned—and during an argument over the distribution of household chores, Selim learns that his father (who had supposedly died years earlier) raped his mother before absconding.
This revelation arrives around fifteen minutes into the film and begins to fissure the characters’ relationship. What to us appears an act of sacrifice on Fatima-Zahra’s part following horrific violence, instead constitutes a violation of trust to Selim. He remains less horrified at the underlying events being revealed than at his mother’s long-standing and carefully crafted deceit. As he notes, the photo of his putative father gifted to him by Fatima-Zahra remains as fake as her jewelry. During an earlier scene, Selim questioned his mother over her extensive application of makeup in preparation for what she claimed was a “job interview” (in reality, it was a liaison) and it’s the patently cosmetic nature of a backstory long trumpeted for respectability’s sake that upsets him. Trust has been broken. In this way, Selim’s refusal to see his mother as a victim in turn grants the audience permission to see Fatima-Zahra in the round: author of many of her own actions, even within extremely unfavorable and coercive conditions. If Selim’s response lacks a certain sympathy, it wholly rejects the patronizing accommodations that insist on depriving individuals of their agency. It’s a masterful bit of filmmaking that simultaneously builds empathy while underscoring complexity.
Afterwards, Selim and his mother travel to the Tangier suburbs, where Selim soon finds work in construction at a palatial riad—a lavish traditional Moroccan home featuring an indoor courtyard and garden. While at the construction site, he elicits the desire of Sébastien, a well-to-do French ex-pat who has come to visit the home’s owner. After commissioning Selim to have sex, Sébastien offers him a job as a sort of general fixer in his home. (Their initial sexual encounter goes poorly and Sébastien’s guilt catalyzes his offer of employment.) In large measure, the complexity and nuance of their relationship, which includes sex, employment, and various genuine acts of care (always contoured by uneven material conditions, disparate nationalities, and distinct social codes inflecting their respective behaviors) anchors much of the film, allowing for an exploration of Selim’s own conflicted feelings towards his homosexuality and towards transactional configurations reminiscent of his mother’s relationships. If Sébastien offers Selim an assistance predicated on unsavory forms of guilt, he nonetheless emerges a sympathetic character who attempts to accommodate differences that can never quite be transcended. In turn, the colliding worlds from which he and Selim come generate insecurities and miscommunications that threaten to fissure their relationship at a moment’s notice.
At the same time, Fatima-Zahra becomes close to a married, pious bus driver whose first wife has fallen ill. They are soon engaged to marry—polygamy remains legal in Morocco. Like Sébastien, Fatima-Zahra’s fiancé is a decent person invariably trapped by social and religious codes that force Fatima-Zahra to hide her past from him. In particular, his reservations concerning Selim’s work—he does not know its sexual dynamics, but remains suspicious of the non-Muslim westerners in Tangiers’ ritziest neighborhoods—strain his relationship with Selim. This further undermines Fatima Zahra’s relationship with her own son. Her chance at stability has come and Selim (almost) remains expendable in its pursuit. These two relationships (Sébastien and Selim, Fatima-Zahra and her fiancé) offer a briefly happy and stable set of affairs that cannot last. In spite of their divergent paths, Selim and Fatima Zahra orbit one another continually—at once undermining and supporting each other, while struggling to forge independent identities and pursue independent goals.
If the film remains decidedly heavy on plot points, it nonetheless succeeds in capturing the ways economic precariousness is rarely characterized by stasis, but instead boomerangs between forms of employment that temporarily provide real material comforts—Selim is able to rent a nice apartment and purchase his mother a much-desired color television after working with Sébastien—and periods dominated by deprivation. Perquisites such as money and affection remain highly contingent upon unstable sets of affairs. As Selim and Fatima-Zahra traverse socioeconomic levels, they remain anchored only to uncertainty, instability, and stress. The good and the bad each appear fleeting, temporary way stations on an indiscernible road.
Throughout, the film adopts various techniques familiar to the American mid-century noir and melodrama—emotionally heightened registers that brook “realism,” musical scores capable of augmenting or undercutting viewers’ emotional responses, dramatic plot twists, and a wonderful color treatment reminiscent of early Technicolor. These “cinematic” effects are leveraged to great effect, smoothing the sharp edges of the work’s social realism in ways that invest the film with a fable-like quality, while rendering palatable extremely challenging subject matter.
We’ve briefly discussed the ways in which certain films, such as Nadine Labaki’s Capernaum (2018) or the Dardenne brothers’ Tori and Lokita (2022), derive their emotional power through unremittingly bleak portrayals of life at the margins. These works self-consciously eschew “cinematic” conventions (film scores, sets, professional actors, customary shot sequences, familiar plot structures) in favor of more presentational styles that invest their works with a bracing verisimilitude. This can be deeply moving, yet threatens to circumscribe audience size and leave viewers bordering on the hopeless. By contrast, The Damned Don’t Cry manages to make its points without evoking despondence in no small part by taking seriously its characters’ ability to shape (within limits) their own lives, while knowingly deploying certain cinematic tropes that generate distance between viewer and character. As its title suggests, the film has learned many lessons from various Joan Crawford rags-to-riches vehicles, alongside similar American films that became expert at delivering subtle political critiques within highly orchestrated stories that promised entertainment above all else.
At base, The Damned Don’t Cry remains the story of a complex relationship underpinned by love, frustration, and ambivalence. That this relationship at times resembles a marriage underscores the ways in which forms of reliance, support, judgement, and power alternate between Fatima-Zahra and Selim. Throughout, Fyzal Boulifa masterfully builds robust characters capable of making different choices, while exploring the social and economic conditions that circumscribe their lives. It’s a powerful piece of cinema.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Fyzal Boulifa — Lynn + Lucy (2019)