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Like tracking the national rate of inflation, following British filmmakers can be dispiriting. Hopes rise, hype grows, another one bites the dust. And then you get a director like Fyzal Boulifa, who is clearly the real thing. Deep in the Covid summer of 2020, Boulifa released his feature debut, Lynn + Lucy, a chilly story of two old school friends in an Essex new town that was at once a bristling piece of social realism and something quite unique.
Now, rather than go for a gig with a US streamer, the writer-director has made an even better second movie. The Damned Don’t Cry is another tale of ties that bind, this time set and shot in Morocco. The souls in question are a once-glamorous middle-aged mother, Fatima-Zahra (Aicha Tebbae), and her gangling, unfinished 16-year-old son Selim (Abdellah El Hajjouji). The film’s lesson, sadly and brilliantly conveyed, echoes the Harry Nilsson song “One”. One is the loneliest number, true, but two “can be as bad as one”.
Yet we start with the pair so close they might be conjoined, asleep in a cheap room in a shabby small town. That first shot is a flawless still life as well as a bait-and-switch. The film will upend their dreams and deliver them into a whirr of motion. Selim’s father is dead, and the scrabble for short-term survival precedes an exit from town. The circumstances are harsh, but the north African sky is a stunning twilight blue. Optimism endures.
Boulifa is the son of Moroccan immigrants to the UK; having grown up in Leicester, he more recently lived and worked in Paris. That mixed identity is there in the gaze of the film: free of gawping exoticism, but with a clear-eyed distance too. Outsiderdom is a theme. Fatima-Zahra fondly recalls chatting with westerners while working in a hotel. Now? Boulifa is too subtle to labour the point, but her only connection to the global seems the internationally familiar tartan laundry bags she lugs from place to place.
All roads lead to Tangier. Here the film truly gets under your skin. The cinematographer is Caroline Champetier, known for her work with director Leos Carax on the surreal Holy Motors and Annette. Champetier can give anything visual charisma. Even on the scuffed margins of the city, she does here too.
Some of that feels bound up with affording the characters a dignity British social realism might deny them. (They don’t call it poverty porn for nothing.) “Isn’t the light amazing?” enthuses a tourist, whose wealthy French friend Selim will later work for. His homosexuality is soon allowed a first exploration. For his mother, though, the light is harder to find. It always has been, her lipsticked pretensions making her the butt of others’ judgments.
But Boulifa makes a movie star of Fatima-Zahra. Where Lynn + Lucy re-energised the stark tradition of Ken Loach and Alan Clarke, here the director works similar magic with vintage Hollywood melodrama. The story fills with careens of fate and shifting personal dynamics. The title is borrowed from a 1950 Joan Crawford movie, but the film has the punch of an earlier Crawford landmark, Mildred Pierce. And like the films of the same era by the great Douglas Sirk, those lush surfaces are deceptive. Cruelties flow beneath: class, colonialism and the self-delusion of men with power that they are being kind when actually protecting their own interests.
A final coup. In Tebbae and El Hajjouji, Boulifa has cast two stars who have never acted on screen before. Watching their powerful work here, that seems almost unbelievable. It’s the only thing in the film that is.
★★★★★
In UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from July 7