The Damned Don’t Cry

In Vin­cent Sherman’s 1950 noir The Damned Don’t Cry, Joan Craw­ford plays a house­wife trapped in a love­less mar­riage, when the trag­ic death of her young son becomes an impe­tus for her to claw her way out of pover­ty and into wealth as she becomes the glam­orous wife of a gang­ster. British-Moroc­can film­mak­er Fyzal Boulifa’s sec­ond fea­ture bor­rows the title of this Craw­ford vehi­cle and retains its melo­dra­ma, only to por­tray an oth­er­wise entire­ly dis­tinct, com­pas­sion­ate­ly-craft­ed sur­vival tale.

The film explores the depths of a com­pli­cat­ed, dys­func­tion­al fam­i­ly rela­tion­ship between mid­dle-aged sin­gle moth­er Fati­ma-Zahra (Aicha Teb­bae) and her sullen son, Selim (Abdel­lah El Hajjou­ji), as they drift through urban Moroc­co, mov­ing from one place to the next and rely­ing on the kind­ness of strangers to safe­guard employ­ment and a roof over their head.

Fati­ma-Zahra keeps the fact that she does sex work a secret, and when she returns to their tiny Casablan­ca flat with a black eye and all her jew­ellery stolen, she decides to seek accom­mo­da­tion at her elder­ly father’s home. The duo’s arrival at the vil­lage is met with con­tempt from both fam­i­ly and neigh­bours, and when Selim over­hears that his moth­er became preg­nant with him as a result of being raped, he begins to har­bour deep resent­ments towards her.

The shad­ow of sex­u­al abuse taunts Fati­ma-Zahra every­where. It’s nei­ther mis­ery nor vio­lence that dri­ves them out of each place, but the scan­dal, rejec­tion and vic­tim-blam­ing that fol­low her as she strug­gles to get to grips with how to break this cycle. But she’s deter­mined to purge her­self of past scan­dals, seek mar­i­tal respon­si­bil­i­ty and give her son anoth­er new beginning.

Des­per­ate times lead Selim to head down a path sim­i­lar to his mother’s. A job in a small lux­u­ry riad owned by wealthy French­man hote­lier Sébastien (Antoine Reinartz), leads to the exchange of sex­u­al favours. Even as Bouli­fa sub­tly depicts a devel­op­ing affec­tion between the two men, he doesn’t shy away from con­fronting the murki­er, more cru­el ram­i­fi­ca­tions at the heart of such a fraught relationship.

All this vio­lence, both latent and overt, makes for a tough watch, and in try­ing to deal with so many soci­etal mat­ters all at once – pover­ty, reli­gion, homo­pho­bia, misog­y­ny, colo­nial­ism – along with a few awk­ward tonal shifts along the way, the film strug­gles to shift into perspective.

Car­o­line Champetier’s impres­sive cin­e­matog­ra­phy grounds the pic­ture in a much more affect­ing con­text, and Boulifa’s unflinch­ing approach is laud­able nonethe­less – his char­ac­ters’ suf­fer­ing is nev­er fetishised. As our focus shifts from moth­er to son, both non-pro­fes­sion­al leads Teb­bae and Hajjou­ji emerge as excep­tion­al per­form­ers capa­ble of deep com­plex­i­ty and nuance, in roles that could oth­er­wise be embod­ied a lit­tle too conventionally.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

By becom­ing a mem­ber you can sup­port our inde­pen­dent jour­nal­ism and receive exclu­sive essays, prints, week­ly film rec­om­men­da­tions and more.