The Damned Don’t Cry - Les damnés ne pleurent pas

 

The Damned Don’t Cry

Les damnés ne pleurent pas

Director ~ Fyzal Boulifa

Writers ~ Fyzal Boulifa, Gabriel Gauchet, Rungano Nyoni

2022, Freance-Belgium-Morocco

Stars ~ Aicha Tebbae, Abdellah El Hajjouji, Antoine Reinartz

 

A portrayal of the disintegration of a mother-son relationship that relies upon hustling on both sides to get by. The social realism leaves them in a constant state of precariousness adrift in North African poverty and at the mercy of the generosity, manipulations, and prejudices of others.

The first time performances by Aïcha Tebbae and Abdellah El Hajjouji are everything, convincing and touching. She just wants to be free, deluded, regal and out for a good time; he just wants some security, if not true options. The street scenes bear the kind of realism found in ‘Pixote’, or ‘Capernaum’, or something like ‘Son of Babylon’; the sense that a just point-and-go camera effortlessly captures the environment, a culture, the dust and dirt and cramped rooms and chances of a peripatetic existence where a TV set comes to represent stability. It’s a place where people are foolhardy rather than villainous, but where foibles are enough to keep ruining things. Salem (El Hajjouji) finds that is natural paranoia and distrust is only ever rewarded; his mother (Tebbae) is quite aware that her fantasies are scant consolation for the truth of things, but what else does she have? There’s the sad sense that this isn’t really, truly, anyone’s fault. For all the tinges of melodrama, the hardships of neo-realism only ever leaves melancholy.

Naturalistic and convincing, a quietly bruising tale of not having the privilege to be yourself when you’re just scraping by.