For his first film, Lynn and Lucy, writer-director Fyzal Boulifa stuck faithfully to the ‘British debut’ script, a kitchen sink story of council estate misery in the classic sub-Loachian mould that defines so much of this country’s filmmaking. For his second feature, The Damned Don’t Cry, though, Boulifa has expanded to more international horizons and ambitions, telling a tale of poverty and itinerant sex work in Morocco. Sadly, however, it’s a messy transition – there’s plenty of clever stuff here about desperation and the spectre of colonialism in North Africa, but the whole thing is so wilfully humourless and populated by such one-note characters that the end result is just boring.
At the heart of The Damned Don’t Cry is the toxic mother-son dynamic between Fatima-Zahra (Aicha Tebbae), a sex worker who knows she’s aging out of the game, and Selim (Abdellah El Hajjouji), a teenager on the cusp of adulthood who feels little but disdain for the world as he looks for more respectable employment after the pair move to Tangier. Both leads, in their first screen roles, give relatively impressive performances, but they’re rarely given notes to play beyond ‘animosity’. In some of the film’s contexts, this is fine; Fatima-Zahra and Selim are facing off against a world that has no interest in them beyond exploitation, but Boulifa’s relentless commitment to only playing these notes is numbing.
As a pair, they seem to detest one another and the film can’t go more than 10 minutes without a cruel shouting match between them. It’s a repetitive device that swiftly becomes irritating to the point that I stopped caring what happened. It’s a shame, because the anger here is sometimes put to good use – Boulifa’s analysis of how the power disparity and humiliation of sex work changes when it’s at the hands of a European in a former colony is sharp and layered – but is undone by its own samey-ness.
Stylistically, The Damned Don’t Cry is a bit of a step up from Lynn and Lucy (Tangier is also just by default more interesting to look at than suburban Essex), but not enough to make up for its drabness elsewhere. At an hour and fifty minutes, it feels like it goes on forever whilst events just happen to two otherwise static characters – their final conversation plays out almost exactly like their first one, a bunch of wheel-spinning resentment and insults that had me wondering why I’d bothered to stick it out to the end.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 