The Damned Don’t Cry

Directed by Fyzal Boulifa

Running time: 1hr52 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Aïcha Tebbae and Abdellah El Hajjouji star in The Damned Don’t Cry

It’s odd how rigidly gendered the parent-child genre tends to be. Film history is rich with mother-daughter weepies and tales of father-son bonding, but mother-son stories are a comparative rarity — as if younger men and older women can’t somehow empathise with each other’s experiences, even in the close bind of a family relationship. British-Moroccan director Fyzal Boulifa’s lavishly felt new film The Damned Don’t Cry is a welcome exception, a melodrama saturated with complicated baggage and restless emotion, all shared by a middle-aged single mother and her only child, a young man asserting his own identity and place in the world. Imagine if Joan Crawford’s prickly eldest in Mildred Pierce had been male rather than female, reflecting his mother even as he insists on masculine independence: Set on the social fringes of Tangier, the film tangles old-school Hollywood with new queer cinema, not to mention the social and cultural particulars of its own geography.

Meanwhile, Boulifa has admitted to cribbing from Pasolini’s Mamma Roma in his construction of Fatima-Zahra, his down-and-out-but-still-proud heroine. Played with regal bearing and canny watchfulness by a superb Aïcha Tebbae, layered in lushly coloured silks and hidden behind oversized knockoff shades, she’s a sex worker and a serial drifter, trudging peripatetically around the country with her teenage son Selim (Abdellah El Hajjouji) in tow; every poky rented room they crash in comes with a renewed promise from her that better things await. For Selim, nearly an adult, the time may have come to make his own way: taking a job at a riad owned by wealthy gay Frenchman Sébastien (Antoine Reinartz), he discovers how easy it is to fall prey to exploitation by a wealthier patriarchy. But the experience awakens unfamiliar desires in him too, and there an already strained mother-son bond starts to fray.

Boulifa worked inventively with the spare, tight tropes of British kitchen-sink realism in his excellent debut Lynn + Lucy, but under warmer Moroccan skies, he permits himself a more sensuous, bejewelled cinematic language: Caroline Champetier’s cinematography paints in Sirkian Technicolor brushstrokes atop the bleached blues and beiges of the landscape, while Nadah El Shazly’s score mixes traditional Arabic flourishes with billowing orchestral themes — a soundtrack for the florid love story that Fatima-Zahra still imagines for herself in life. As our sympathies volley between a destitute mother on the brink of abandonment and the wiry youth seeking a chance at his own bliss after a lifetime of merely surviving, The Damned Don’t Cry plays with our ideas of what’s masculine and feminine in filmmaking, alternating tersely realist tragedy with glittering, overbloomed romanticism — and not always in accordance with the character you might expect.

THE DAMNED DON’T CRY (2023) Written by Fyzal Boulifa | Shot by Caroline Champetier | Edited by François Quiqueré 

On Curzon Home Cinema and in selected cinemas now