Movie Review: Calle Málaga

Our Jean Hudson got along to a preview of Calle Malaga – Malaga Street, of course – and just loved it! Here’s her review.

When asked to review the movie Calle Málaga set in Morocco, I was delighted. Morocco is on my bucket list, and with travel there feeling out of reach right now, a film set in the vibrant streets of Tangier felt like the next best thing. What I got was so much more than a travel escape.

Directed by Moroccan filmmaker Maryam Touzani, the film features Carmen Maura as María Ángeles. María is a 79-year-old Spanish widow, who has lived in Tangier all her life, and thrives on its vibrant cross-cultural energy. Early scenes show her strolling its cobbled streets, chatting with local grocers and spice vendors, and cooking up a storm in her kitchen as Latin jazz plays on her vintage record player. She’s spent 40 years making it her own, from the scarlet geraniums on her balcony to the wooden spoons in her kitchen. She tends to her family’s graves and visits her best friend in a cloistered nunnery. Their one-way conversations are hilarious.

Less sold on Tangier’s charms is María’s only child Clara (Marta Etura), a frazzled middle-aged nurse who left at the age of 17 for the brighter lights of Madrid. María is delighted when Clara turns up for a rare visit. Less so when she learns why. With money tight after an unpleasant divorce, Clara intends to sell her mother’s apartment, which her late father left in her name.

Overnight, María’s independence is threatened, her possessions sold, with a choice of returning to Spain with her daughter or entering a nursing home. Anyone with aging parents will feel this like a punch to the gut. That tension between a grown child’s practicality and a parent’s fierce need for autonomy and dignity — is painfully real.

María moves into a nursing home, it becomes clear she won’t fit in. There is a funny scene: ‘if you’re bored, go cut your pussy hair,’ she says to a pushy, patronizing in-house hairdresser. She signs herself out and 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.

María rediscovers not only her resilience but also love and desire — feelings she thought were long behind her. Love and passion don’t have an expiry date, and this film makes you feel that in your bones.

Carmen Maura, now 80, shines in a rare later-life leading role, embracing the full gamut of emotions: defeat, sorrow, laughter, mischief and sensuality.

This movie is an ode to the physical spaces that sustain us. I left thinking about my 90-year-mother who still lives independently on her farm, my own aging, and always being brave enough to reach for love.

This Venice Festival audience favourite is screening at Luna Leederville, Luna on SX, and the Windsor from April 23, 2026.

Highly recommended. I give this movie 8 out of 10.

*By Jean Hudson

Jean Hudson is our Shipping and Sailing Correspondent and also a regular feature writer, reviewer and photographer here on the Shipping News. You may also like to follow up her informative Places I Love stories, as well as other feature stories and Freo Today photographs, right here.

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