Old Yorker

  • The Blue Caftan

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Le bleu du caftan

    Maryam Touzani (2022)

    I’ve made some poor choices of what to see at this year’s London Film Festival but The Blue Caftan is an exception.  The films I’ve watched in the last nine days haven’t been short of admirable performances and Maryam Touzani’s drama features two more, in the lead roles.  But whereas other standout actors impressed despite shortcomings in the writing of their movie (Jennifer Lawrence and Brian Tyree Henry in Causeway, Olivia Colman and Tom Brooke in Empire of Light), Saleh Bakri and Luzna Azabal, who play husband and wife in The Blue Caftan, are blessed with a script, by Touzani and Nabil Ayouch, that is thought through and worked through.  The storyline keeps taking you by surprise.  The unexpected turns are dramatically and humanly convincing.

    Mina (Azabal) and Halim (Bakri) run a tailoring business – caftans a speciality – in the medina of the Moroccan city of Salé.  Halim, a maalem (presumably ‘master tailor’), learned his craft and inherited the store from his late father but Mina has been the driving force in the business and in the couple’s relationship.  It’s she who deals primarily with customers, with placing orders for fabric from merchants, and so on.  It was Mina, we later discover, who proposed marriage to the reserved, dignified Halim.  He’s a behind-the-scenes figure in the store, based in the small back room where he works on individual commissions for clients.  The film begins shortly after Youssef (Ayoub Missioui) has been taken on as Halim’s latest apprentice and at a time when Mina’s long-standing ill health is getting worse.  She has undergone repeated, expensive and unavailing treatments for cancer.   She usually leaves the store before her husband, returning to their apartment to prepare their evening meal.  To be more accurate, Halim’s evening meal:  Mina can rarely manage the rfissa or other dishes that she prepares.  She subsists on a diet of tangerines and morphine.

    Working cheek by jowl, Halim and Youssef say little but, from the start, exchange significant looks.  On his way home from work, Halim visits a public bathhouse (hammam) and has sex with another man in one of the cubicles there.  On his next visit there, Hamil’s cubicle partner is the man who hands out keys and soap at the entrance to the hammam.  The Blue Caftan’s destination seems obvious but the route taken is complex – thanks to Maryam Touzani’s interweaving of the sartorial and sexual aspects of the story, and her portrait of the central relationship.  Their union is childless and, although Halim and Mina share a bed, sexless now, except for the wife’s occasional vain attempts to arouse her husband.  Mina’s illness began with breast cancer:  the combination of a terminal disease that eats away at her female identity and a marital relationship that insults her womanhood sounds pat but the richness of the screenplay and acting transcends neat symbolic design.  We can see how, and therefore believe that, this marriage has lasted – through mutual affection, a shared interest in the business that consumes so much of the couple’s energies, the ability to make each other laugh.

    The interweaving mentioned above is achieved in images (the lucent cinematography is by Virginie Surdej) as well as in what the characters say and do.  We watch Halim at work and, in particular, the progress of the garment that gives the film its title:  the blue caftan is supposedly Halim’s most intricate and demanding commission to date, destined for a particularly pushy client.   Touzani also regularly punctuates the narrative with isolated shots of fabrics, braids and other decorative trimmings.    When, early on, Halim tells Mina he thinks the new trainee shows promise, she’s sceptical:  Youssef, she says, is from the wrong side of the tracks and, like apprentices they’ve had before, won’t stick around.  We’ve already picked up from their faces that Halim is attracted to Youssef and that Mina has noticed, which makes this brief conversation between husband and wife intriguingly ambiguous.  It’s as if Halim, at some level of his mind, is linking Youssef’s potential as a tailor and as a lover (this is the one …).  It’s as if Mina is compelled to remind Halim that Youssef isn’t the first of his kind.  This needn’t mean that Halim has had physical relationships with other apprentices; it does imply that he has wanted them (and that his wife knows this).

    One evening, when Mina and Halim unusually leave the store at the same time, she asks to accompany him to a café in the medina that she knows he frequents.  She tells him she’s wanted to go there for ages.  The café isn’t another part of his homosexual life but Halim’s unease as he and Mina sit together there is because the clientele appears to be men only.  There’s a football international on the café’s television:  Halim’s discomfort is increased, though he also manages to see the funny side, when Mina cheers a goal scored by the wrong team.  She doesn’t meekly submit to either her cancer or her husband’s sexuality but The Blue Caftan dramatises Mina’s growing recognition that illness is making it impossible for her to run the business and will, in time, mean she can no longer keep watch on Halim.  When a roll of expensive pink fabric goes missing, she accuses Youssef of stealing it, which prompts him to quit (as Mina predicted he would).  When Mina is too ill for work most days and Halim is spending more time at home to care for her, Youssef  returns to his job and minds the store.  On a rare reappearance in there, Mina comes upon the pink fabric, tucked away on a shelf, and realises she must have forgotten she put it there.

    She weeps bitterly when she apologises to Youssef for this – which she does not in the store but in her bedroom:  by this stage, the apprentice has pretty well moved in with his employers, helping with the cooking and cleaning that are now beyond Mina.  From this point on, Maryam Touzani and Nabil Ayouch are engaged in an increasingly tricky balancing act:  can they bring the film’s main themes to fruition while retaining credibility?  I think they do – or, at least, that key scenes are staged well enough to suspend disbelief.  There’s an extraordinary sequence in which the trio dances together in the apartment.  Mina just about summons the strength to do so for a short while and her pleasure in dancing is a poignantly vivid illustration of her capacity for fun.  Yet she also perceives, as she and the two men move to the music, that Halim has relaxed enough to reveal it’s Youssef’s close company in the dance that he’s most enjoying.  When Mina can’t dance any more, she virtually hands Halim over to Youssef.

    When Halim subsequently and tearfully tells her how sorry he is for trying but always failing to suppress his true sexual feelings, Mina insists she’s nevertheless grateful for the strengths of their marriage.  She tells Halim she wants him to be happy and urges him not to be afraid to love.  Same-sex activity, for both men and women, remains illegal in Morocco.  Is it even plausible for a Moroccan woman – especially the practising Muslim that Mina seems to be – to give permission to a man to replace her in her husband’s life, as she does in that pas de trois and in what she then says to Halim?  Perhaps not, but Luzna Azabal brilliantly conveys a sense that, as she nears death, Mina, without renouncing her religion, is seized by the stronger imperative to do right by the man she still loves.  It helps, too, that Maryam Touzani never reduces Mina to saintliness.  She dresses and bathes herself independently for as long as she can.  Halim is always on hand yet retains a respectful, fearful distance at the sight of his wife’s painfully thin, naked back.  She eventually asks him to help undress her and to wash her hair.  He fingers her mastectomy scar tentatively, curiously.  When he washes her hair, Mina laughs in pleasure and Azabal makes the laugh throaty, almost lustful.  For most of the film, it’s not clear if Mina knows what Halim gets up to at the public bathhouse.  In their hot, small apartment, not long before she dies, she tells him and Youssef they both ‘stink like camels’ and to take themselves off to the hammam.  They do as she says.

    This film’s approach to its subject matter is unusually clear-minded and fair-minded.  The Blue Caftan doesn’t condemn Halim and Mina’s years together as a waste of their time.  But nor does it dodge the fact that sexual incompatibility has made both their lives deeply frustrating.  It doesn’t pretend that it would have been easy in the society of which they’re part for Halim to come out as gay; at the same time, Mina’s awareness of what can go on in a single-sex bathhouse suggests that women like her aren’t blind but, rather, capable of turning a blind eye.   Neither protagonist is treated as merely a victim of the other or of their culture.  The intelligent balance of the piece enables both main actors to build penetrative characterisations.  Saleh Bakri’s finely modulated anguish beautifully complements Luzna Azabal’s more startling, volatile presence and power.  The role of Youssef is relatively underwritten but Ayoub Missioui plays it well.

    It’s no surprise that the title clothing plays a big part in the film’s climax but this is satisfyingly achieved.  Work on the dress is completed just as Mina dies.  When other women come to the apartment to prepare her, all in white, for her funeral, Halim sacrilegiously interrupts and tells them to leave.  He uses the ornate blue caftan to dress his late wife for burial.  He and Youssef bear Mina’s coffin to the cemetery, along a route that’s become familiar through repeated shots of it in the course of the story.  The closing scene of The Blue Caftan also works well.  Halim and Youssef are shown sitting side by side in the  café where Halim once sat with Mina.  You do wonder what kind of future these two men can have together.  How easily will Halim slough off a lifelong guilty conscience?  Is Youssef, twenty years his junior, really devoted to Halim?   But they blend easily enough into their surroundings.  Their faces and body language give little away about their relationship.  A homosocial environment, in which most eyes are glued to the sport on television, affords good camouflage.

    15 October 2022

  • The Whale

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Darren Aronofsky (2022)

    The Whale, showing at the London Film Festival, is based on the 2012 play of the same name by Samuel D Hunter.  Only for the first few minutes does Darren Aronofsky attempt to disguise his film’s stage origins.  The opening shots show a road and surrounding landscape in rural Idaho.  Next up is a computer screen, filled by the faces of students participating in an online literature seminar.  Aronofsky’s camera then moves inside the apartment of Charlie, the academic leading the seminar.  Except for occasional exterior shots at the entrance to his home and a brief flashback sequence, the camera doesn’t get out of the apartment again.  Nor does six-hundred-pound Charlie, the film’s title character and decidedly of the beached variety.

    Although his voice is heard, Charlie remains unseen during the seminar sequence:  a blank square at the centre of the computer screen, he tells his students he has to get the camera on his laptop fixed.  In our first sight of him, Charlie (Brendan Fraser) is sprawled in a chair, masturbating as he watches gay porn on the laptop.  Doing so nearly gives him a heart attack.  He calls someone called Liz, urging her to get over to his place.  When the doorbell rings, Charlie shouts, ‘It’s open’:  enter not Liz but Thomas (Ty Simpkins), a young evangelical Christian missionary.  In the course of the film, Thomas will return to the apartment several times – so will Liz (Hong Chau), who is Charlie’s friend and a nurse at a local hospital, and Ellie (Sadie Sink), his estranged teenage daughter.  Her mother Mary (Samantha Morton), Charlie’s ex-wife, puts in an appearance, too.  Hunter’s play (he also did the film’s screenplay) is evidently one of those single-set theatre pieces that encapsulate the character and backstory of a somehow confined protagonist through dialogues with key people in their life – a life now approaching its end.

    Exterior shots in The Whale show the weather as always grim.  Thomas represents a group called New Life, more than once referred to as an end-of-times cult.  To reinforce the doomsday atmosphere, Aronofsky and Hunter have updated the story to 2016:  the apartment’s television shows coverage from Republican presidential primaries.  All in all, it’s pretty clear the end is nigh for morbidly obese Charlie.  He’s eating himself to death and pizza delivery man Dan (Sathya Sridharan) is another regular caller, though he doesn’t cross the threshold; once Charlie has phoned an order, he hauls himself up and struggles on a walking frame – or, later, in a hospital wheelchair, obtained by Liz – to the doorway, leaving the pizza money just outside.  Dan’s curiosity eventually gets the better of him.  He contrives to get a look at his customer and is shocked by the sight.  Before he finally signs off, Charlie also shows himself to the zoominar students, whose facial reactions are a mixture of suppressed pity and horror.

    These moments have probably intensified the accusations of ‘fatphobia’ levelled at The Whale but this viewer has to admit needing no encouragement to find Charlie uncomfortable viewing.  I sometimes wanted to look elsewhere, hoping, for example (and in vain), that Aronofsky would cut away before Charlie negotiated his way into the shower.  His appearance and situation kept bringing other films and their leading men incorrectly to mind.  Wearing a vast grey T-shirt, Charlie gives a new meaning to Elephant Man; next to Charlie, the hugely obese Jake LaMotta of Raging Bull is a featherweight.  (Charlie is also stuck in his own private Idaho.)  Cheap shots aside, though, isn’t criticism of this kind of ‘body shaming’ an instance of political correctness trumping common sense – and itself an expression of prejudice?  Charlie’s overweight is a pathological condition:  he has been diagnosed with congestive heart failure.  If he were, say, a skin-and-bones alcoholic or drug addict, would his story reflect phobic attitudes towards the behaviour that’s killing him?  The flashback showing him on a family holiday in happier times confirms that Charlie was, as he himself says, always on the big side – but nowhere the size he is now.  Overeating is this self-loathing, despairing man’s way of making himself feel and look worse, of ensuring that he literally can’t escape his situation, of hastening his end.

    His physical grotesqueness complements the mawkishness of the storyline (insistently confirmed by Rob Simonsen’s mournful score).  Samuel Hunter recognises the dramatic need to tie his small cast of characters together and Darren Aronofsky is well equipped to point up the melodramatic highlights.  After Charlie’s sexuality brought his marriage to Mary to an end, he lived with Liz’s brother, who was the love of Charlie’s life.  As Asian child immigrants to the US, Liz and her brother were adopted by members of the same New Life sect that Thomas belongs to.  Their adoptive father’s hardline evangelism and homophobia drove Liz’s brother to commit suicide.  His death turned Charlie to self-destruction and explains Liz’s vehement antipathy to Thomas.  Ever since Charlie left her and her mother, Ellie has been disruptive at home and at school.  There are two whales in the story, the other being Moby-Dick, and repeated references to an essay about Melville’s novel (first published as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale) that Charlie treasures and quotes from.  When Ellie re-enters her father’s life, he’s eager to atone to the extent of ghosting her high-school literature assignments.  It turns out the cherished Moby-Dick crit was written not by one of Charlie’s students but by Ellie in eighth grade, before she turned sour and angry.

    Mary remembers that she found her ex-husband’s ‘positivity really annoying’.  The film makes you sympathise with her, at least as far as Charlie’s feelings about Ellie are concerned, though at one point this is genuinely amusing.  He’s convinced that Ellie is a born writer:  when he finds a few words she’s jotted down on one of her visits – ‘This apartment stinks.  This notebook is retarded.  I hate everyone’ – Charlie counts the syllables and decides Ellie has composed a haiku.  It’s his daughter’s Moby-Dick example that prompts him, in his last online teaching session, to tell his students to forget all that phony academic stuff and to write-what-you-feel.  Doing right by Ellie is Charlie’s one-minute-to-midnight mission – in order to mend their relationship and salvage something from his wrecked life.  It emerges that, in fact, he’s been laying the ground for this for some time:  he has considerable savings, which he won’t use for medical treatment but will give entirely to Ellie.  It’s presumably the humanly redeeming effect of all this that explains the white light flooding the screen in the film’s closing shots, as Charlie breathes his last.  This burst of transcendence is a bit confusing:  it looks as if the hero is going to heaven.

    Aronofsky presumably doesn’t mean to suggest that although The Whale does keep faith with undoubting Thomas for longer than might be expected.  He eventually shows his true homophobic colours but by this stage has also shown some vulnerability, succumbing to temptress Ellie’s invitation to smoke pot, revealing that he ran away to Idaho from his native Oregon to escape issues with the local religious community that includes his parents.  (Ellie posts online photos of the pot-smoking so that the Oregon mission knows Thomas is OK – this at least is how positive-thinking Charlie interprets his daughter’s actions.)  Ty Simpkins does well in stressing Thomas’s sympathetic, compassionate side.  Sadie Sink finds it hard to do likewise in her monotonously acrid playing of Ellie.  Hong Chau (best known for Alexander Payne’s Downsizing (2016), a polar opposite film in which people got fantastically small) is forceful as Liz.  Mary’s a clumsily conceived character but Samantha Morton, as usual, brings emotional truth to her role.

    But The Whale is, as it must be, Brendan Fraser’s show.  Like the man he’s playing, Fraser has always been on the big side.  It’s a few years since I last saw him on screen so it’s a relief to learn that his appearance here is largely artificial:  according to Wikipedia, ‘Fraser would spend four hours each day in the make-up department getting fitted with prosthetics that weighed up to 300 pounds. … He also worked with a dance instructor for months prior to filming to figure out how his character would move with the excess weight …’ (the prosthetics, of course, have also been deplored by Defenders of the Fat).  The performance certainly is a remarkable physical achievement but its best feature – and what makes you root for Charlie – is Brendan Fraser’s vocal variety, blending pain and humour, and plenty more in between.  I don’t think I’m stressing this just because I might have found The Whale easier to cope with as a piece for voices only.

    14 October 2022

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