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