The Blue Caftan

Here's a delicately turned out drama about love and repression in a Moroccan medina. Director and co-writer, Maryam Touzani keeps a steady pace, not slow, but nothing's going to waste here. Every scene, every glance, every sigh, every mandarin seems utterly crucial to the story. 

For all its outward sobriety, this is quite a seditious film. It concerns a married couple trying to maintain the relevance of their caftan store in the face of 'modern' advances in technology, like....sewing machines. Halim is a traditional maalem (master), attempting to keep the caftan stitching art of his father alive. Mina is the face and brain of the business, it's her idea to bring in an apprentice for Halim. Youssef is a much younger, attractive bloke, whose inexperience is balanced by his eagerness. 

The wrinkle in the tale is that Halim is (likely always has been) gay, and the secrecy is clearly weighing on him. He also, very obviously loves his wife, who is doing her best to hold the lie. When Halim find himself drawn to Youssef, his guilt at these feelings is only exacerbated by the fact that Mina is suffering with some medical issues, in fact, probably dying. Some of these moments are proper gut punches and the film's climactic gesture is a great piece of cinema.

Lubna Azabal and Saleh Bakri, as Mina and Halim, are fantastic. They sell their relationship really well, and the third wheel of Youseff (Ayoub Missouri) seems like an unwanted distraction until things run deeper. The fourth character is the impressive blue caftan of the title. The significance of this item of clothing is unpicked late in the film but it acts as a touchstone, its importance growing throughout.

Considering homosexuality is criminalised in Morocco, even just making the film was a pretty brave effort by Touzani and her cast and crew. There are also slight digs at the uber-male, ultra-religious Moroccan society. Mina and Halim visit a café where she is the only woman to be seen. Later, they bemoan the austere funeral parade of a once lively local woman. But it's the final subversive flourish that makes this a first-rate emotional protest film.

The Blue Caftan screened as part of the Perth Festival at the Somerville Auditorium at UWA from March 20 - 26, and will screen at Luna from Mar 30.

See also: The dedication to craft put me in mind of another top notch film about a fashion creator, Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread (2017), but I got the itchiest hint of a fine book by Orhan Pamuk called My Name is Red (1998)