While its subject carried within it a great impressionistic and sensory ambition, Nabil Ayouch’s new film is too conventional a chronicle.
After Whatever Lola Wants (2007) which recounted the setbacks of a New York Post Office employee dreaming of becoming an oriental dancer in Egypt, and Much Loved (2015) which explored prostitution in Morocco, Moroccan filmmaker Nabil Ayouch once again looks at the condition of women in Arab countries with Everybody loves Touda.
Fixing its camera on the face of Touda (Nisrin Erradi), the film tells the story of this young woman who tries to realize her dream of becoming a singer while raising her 9-year-old deaf-mute son.
Liberation poetry
Cheikha (traditional singer) in the Atlas Mountains where she sings traditional protest songs celebrating women and their eternal struggle against patriarchy, she decides to go to Casablanca to improve her living conditions and that of her son.
Living until now mainly on variety and chaâbi, that is to say Moroccan popular music, she dreams of being able to interpret the aïta, this ancestral musical genre originating from the Arab Bedouin tribes, true poetry of liberation.
We miss the song
Of the two issues raised by the film (on the one hand, the emancipatory objective of its main character, on the other, a feverish portrait of Moroccan musical culture) Nabil Ayouch’s view will mainly focus on the first.
Unfortunately the most obvious and conventional fragment, the film fails to transcend the story of an initiatory journey through the sensoriality of the musical performance scenes. Never finding the right distance with his subject, Ayouch’s camera thus misses the great vitality of these singing scenes.
Nisrin Erradi irradiates the screen alone
Too elliptical and succeeding one another too quickly for us to experience all the excitement, the film sacrifices its impressionistic vein in favor of an almost one-dimensional and much too programmatic look at the trajectory of its character.
The actress Nisrin Erradi, striking with her physical strength and her fragility in her eyes, may irradiate the screen with her presence, but she seems to be the only one in charge of restoring the immense secret of the aïta. His talent and his immense involvement will not be enough: of the great subversive force of this song, of its power of fascination, of this pulsation of life, we will see too little.
Everybody loves Toudaby Nabil Ayouch with Nisrin Erradi, Joud Chamihy, Jalila Tlemsi, in theaters December 18 2024
