Acting
Since Mina is sufficiently mentally impaired that her judgement is not all that it might be, in this Moroccan drama her actions are not questioned. She doesn't know what's happening when a taxi driver has sex with her, and she's equally clueless about how she accidentally killed him. However, she does recognize that having a dead body around is a liability, and she buries the taxi driver under a pile of sea salt. When it turns out that she's pregnant, her aged fisherman father and loving stepmother put her in hiding and the stepmother pretends to be the pregnant one, so that when the child is born she can claim it as her own.
The film focuses on an ill-matched group of individuals who meet up in Tangier, all nursing hopeless dreams of going to Europe: Mohamed to see a horse race, Ali to have an operation to restore his sight, Fatima to rejoin her mother. Mohamed enters a fantasy world, pretending to his wife that he is already in Paris, and steals to pay for his visa. Ferhati creates a suffocating world, reminiscent in some ways of the French poetic realism of the 1930s: the enigmatic blind man, rain-swept and darkened streets, characters prevented from achieving their dreams, the opportunity to escape always in view but always just out of reach.
In Moroccan Chronicles, set in the ancient city of Fez, a working class mother, abandoned by her husband who has emigrated to Europe, tells three tales to her just-circumcised ten-year-old son. In the first, Smihi re-stages the Marrakech market scene from Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much, in which a monkey trainer makes children dance for tourists. In the second, two lovers meet on the ramparts of Orson Welles’s Essaouira locations for Othello and speak of their own forbidden love. And in the third, set in Smihi’s home town of Tangier, an old sailor dreams of vanquishing a sea monster: the Gibraltar ferry that connects Europe to Africa.
