In 1978 Mae West made an ill-advised comeback at the age of 86. She played the part of a glamour-puss without a “nod to the passage time” and looking “positively embalmed”. Making allowance for her seniority, seeing her act a sex-symbol you are reminded of what Samuel Johnson said about a dog walking on its hind legs: you don’t ask if you could do it well; you marvel that it can do it all.
In “Calle Malaga”, the eighty-year-old Carmen Maura, playing a Spanish widow living in Tangier who after being widowed for 20 years rediscovers her sensuality, makes a far more plausible object of desire. She makes no attempt to adopt a veneer of youth; the opening sequences show close-ups of hands bearing the marks of time as they pick out goods from the market and later prepare them in her kitchen.
But Señora Maura is perennially beautiful, with her warm eyes and kind smile. Spanish Cinema has always provided good roles for older actresses, and the cinema going public has always to have provided a place for them in its heart. Carmen Maura famous for her early association with Pedro Almodóvar, and much else besides, is a prime example. On my two attempts to see the film to the end (on the first one the projector broke) the auditorium was packed and I suspect she was a major draw. In the queue I overheard one lady ask for tickets for “Carmen Maura” before she remembered the film’s title.
The story begins with Maria Ángeles shopping, chatting, cooking, palpably in love with her life in Tangier, palpably in love with her life in the eponymous Calle Málaga, surrounded by mementos of her life with her deceased husband.
She then receives a visit from her daughter Clara played by Marta Etura. From the start Clara is less than ebullient on her return to her place of birth and her reunion with her mother, and she is soon to drop a bombshell. She has decided to sell the flat which her mother occupies, and which her deceased husband placed in his daughter’s name. She is, after all, a single mother with a less-than-supportive ex-husband, and she works as a nurse while struggling to bring up two children. She is fed up with renting and wants a flat of her own and needs the money to make a downpayment. María Ángeles is faced with either leaving Tangier and joining her daughter and grandchildren in Madrid or remaining in her hometown but entering an old people’s home. She chooses the latter, but she soon does a bunk and resumes her own residence, despite it being up for sale, and sets about trying to recover her personal effects. And during this, she unexpectedly finds love again.
The film is also well served by her co-star, Marta Etura, playing the daughter Clara. Another filmmaker might have shown scenes of Clara in Madrid as a struggling working single mother to contrast with the mother’s easygoing life in Tangier. With Señora Etura these would have been superfluous. Her story is written on her careworn face. As she reacquaints herself with the town of her birth, her figure is impenetrable to the warmth, friendliness and sensuality of Tangier that surrounds her. So ground down by life is she, that she appears impervious to joie de vivre.
This divides our sympathies. We might see ourselves disapproving of the daughter’s callousness at evicting her own mother. But our criticism might switch to the mother trying to preserve her own happiness while being indifferent to her daughter’s real struggles with the world.
But poignant though this is, the film reaps much humour from the situations in which María Ángeles finds herself such as her money-making scheme, or the tracking down of a record player after its distress sale.
The film can be seen as a love letter to Tangier. But is also works as a meditation on the ephemeral nature of happy circumstances. All good things come to an end; but if we put up a fight, we can at least summon up an Indian summer.