‘Calle Malaga’ Review: A Likable Showcase for a Lovable Carmen Maura Performance

A man’s home is his castle, but that’s men for you — making everything a bit bigger than it is. Maria Angeles’ home is just her home, and she treasures its cozy modesty. A sun-strewn apartment in Tangier’s lively, diverse historic center, she’s spent 40 years making it meticulously and characterfully her own, from the effusively scarlet geraniums on her balcony to the long-seasoned wooden spoons in her kitchen. Though she’s a bit lonely in widowhood, the flat’s sunset-hued, picture-covered walls give her comfort and a kind of company, something Maria Angeles’ self-oriented daughter doesn’t understand. But “Calle Malaga” does. Maryam Touzani‘s gentle, toasty-warm later-life drama is an ode to the physical spaces that sustain us, and quite winning as such.

It is also an ode, even more winningly, to the indefatigable screen presence of Carmen Maura. The veteran Spanish star’s expressive, saucer-eyed features helped define the oeuvre of one Pedro Almodóvar from his early 1970s experiments through to 2006’s “Volver” — but she hasn’t since found as generously fixated a collaborating director. A sweet soft serve that isn’t out to challenge its audience, or even really its star, “Calle Malaga” is no Almodóvar work. But it’s the most prominent and devoted leading showcase Maura has had in years, and one she carries with her invaluable brand of internally illuminated, can’t-be-taught charisma.

Touzani, the Moroccan writer-director who displayed a sure, audience-friendly touch with her 2022 queer drama “The Blue Caftan,” knows exactly what she has in Maura, exactly how to place the camera on her, and exactly how much to stay out of her way. The result is a sincere but precisely tooled star vehicle — easy-breezy but with just a little lump in its throat — that should be widely embraced by older arthouse patrons, following a festival run beginning with a premiere in Venice’s newly created Spotlight section. International sales have already been unsurprisingly brisk.

Introductory title cards offer a potted history of Tangier, a city on Morocco’s northernmost coast only a short ferry ride away from Spain, and how that proximity made it a hub for Spaniards fleeing the Francoist dictatorship in the 1930s. The daughter of two such immigrants, Maria Angeles (Maura) has lived in Tangier all her life, and thrives on its vibrant cross-cultural energy: Early scenes show her exuberantly strolling its cobbled streets, chatting animatedly with local grocers and spice vendors, and cooking up a storm in her kitchen as Latin jazz bubbles away on her vintage record player. Notwithstanding the death of her husband some years ago, these look like the golden years — very golden, as glowingly lensed by DP Virginie Surdej — to which pretty much everyone aspires.

Less sold on Tangier’s charms is Maria Angeles’ only child Clara (Marta Etura), a frazzled middle-aged nurse who left long ago for the brighter European lights of Madrid. Maria Angeles is delighted when Clara turns up for a rare visit. Less so when she learns the reason behind it. With money tight after an unpleasant divorce, Clara intends to sell her mother’s apartment — which her late father left in her name — in a matter of weeks. Maria Angeles’ choices are to move in with her daughter in Spain, or accept a place in the local state nursing home: Too wedded to Tangier to leave, she reluctantly takes the latter option, though it soon becomes clear she won’t fit in. (“If you’re bored, go cut your pussy hair,” she says to a pushy, patronizing in-house beautician — an atypical line for this affable character, and one Maura delivers with vinegary relish.)

Homeless after impulsively signing herself out of the institution, Maria Angeles hatches a plan to squat in secret in her beloved apartment. It’s been emptied for sale, but she talks local antiques dealer Abslam (Ahmed Boulane) into returning her sold-off furniture — and soon further charms him into a tentative romance.

That is more or less the extent of the plot in Touzani’s script, written in collaboration with her husband, producer and fellow filmmaker Nabil Ayouch (“Casablanca Beats”), which proceeds to coast on a cheery sense of community and Maria Angeles’ general geniality as a character. This is not as rich or socially mindful a last-woman-standing drama as, say, Kleber Mendonça Filho’s “Aquarius,” which “Calle Malaga” vaguely resembles in premise, though it’s an altogether lighter, more personality-driven affair.

Maura’s performance makes Maria Angeles so magnetic and eccentric — earthily practical on some matters, dizzily irrational on others, and sympathetically true to herself on all fronts — that all the film’s other characters want for detail and texture by comparison. Clara, in particular, is a relentlessly sour pill, and the script could stand to unpack their superficially loving but strained mother-daughter relationship with a little more nuance. An excess of ambiguity, on the other hand, slightly scuppers the film’s abrupt, in-limbo ending, where “Calle Malaga” would be better off following through on its crowdpleasing instincts — and following its lovable heroine’s bliss in the process.