Review of 'The Damned Don't Cry': Fyzal Boulifa's refined and surprisingly queer mother-son melodrama

In the Dark Little Remembered 1950's "The Damned Don't Cry", Joan Crawford plays a Texan housewife whose grief for her dead son drives her to start a new life in the urban underworld. Fyzal Boulifa's exquisite new film of the same title is expressly named after this Crawford vehicle, but is neither a remake nor a direct homage. Rather, it remixes the narrative components of this film and others of its ilk into the new-school-old-school heart-killer genre - one might say tearful if its characters weren't, true to its title, stoically dry. all the way – which could have been designed for the shoulder-length diva if she was alive in 2022 and, perhaps most crucially, of Moroccan descent.

Retracing the turbulent relationship between a single mother and her teenage son on the margins of Tangier society, Le BAFTA-nominated British-Moroccan filmmaker Boulifa's second feature sees him focus on his North African homeland after the English kitchen sink tragedy of his excellent debut 'Lynn + Lucy'.

It's not full immersion though. In its fusion of Hollywood Sirkish melodrama with the high emotionality of the Arabic soap opera and a more austere strain of European art house realism - with Pasolini's "Mamma Roma" another clearly cited influence - this haunting, peculiar and often expressly queer about social isolation and the survival of the outsider resembles Boulifa's moving and idiosyncratic way of connecting the components of her cultural identity. After its premiere at the Lido in the sidebar of the Venice Days, this sufficiently dispersed co-production (French-Belgian-Moroccan, with the imprimatur of BBC Films as a bonus) will go to the main competition at the London Film Festival, with other festival bookings and specialist multi-territory distribution is sure to follow.

While the tone and narration here are more maturely expressive than in Boulifa's early days, the distinctive rigor of his staging has been postponed: This time working with Leos Carax's favorite DP, Caroline Champetier, Boulifa once again favors tight and precisely composed tableaux that often boil down to human still lifes, illuminating and isolating minor domestic and decorative details that reveal much about the airs and aspirations of Fatima-Zahra (Aïcha Tebbae), a middle-aged, never-married wanderer who long ago left her Puritan hometown to live a glamorous life - and now supports herself and her son Selim (Abdellah El Hajjouji) with sex work.

Usually sharing a mattress in the dingy little rooms they rent for just a few weeks before moving on to something else, The relationship between Fatima-Zahra and Selim is less that of a mother and her son than that of equal partners - plagued by Freudian currents, even more complicated now than Selim, almost a man himself, is increasingly aware of its own sexuality as potential currency. When he stumbles upon the long-hidden truth of his fatherhood, the mother-son bond is strained; determined to assert himself as the man of the house, he accepts a series of jobs that lead him to a sort of position as a house boy in a luxury riad owned by the wealthy and attractive Frenchman Sébastien ("BPM" standout Antoine Reinartz).

At first disgusted by Antoine's advances, Selim gradually becomes disgusted and succumbs, but this has consequences rippling consequences for her relationship with Fatima-Zahra – now on her own “Mildred Pierce” path of self-reinvention as an upright citizen. Even as the film's perspective is increasingly driven by Selim, "The Damned Don't Cry" never loses its sympathy for a matriarch whose life has been so heavily shaped by the desires and violations of men that her own moral compass is for sale.

Boulifa films Tebbae — like El Hajjouji and much of the ensemble, a non-professional — with a clear, compassionate goal that neither patronizes nor fetishizes her suffering. Often styled in metallic-accented costumes and lavish makeup reminiscent of Elizabeth Taylor's mid-career, she's a proud, regal presence even in her most diminished form. There's a naïve, brash brashness to Tebbae's performance that contrasts effectively with El Hajjouji's more vigilant, Lyncean physicality; as mother and son, they feel well modeled on distinct generations of screen iconography, even though for much of their life together they never had a television set of their own.