One can easily see some good 'bad publicity' in the controversy surrounding "Much Loved" and its theatrical ban from Morocco, but it also lead to violent attacks against its main star Lubna Abidar, as if reality had overshadowed fiction, which says a lot.
I'm Moroccan and I avoided the film for a series of wrong reasons that seemed right at that time. My brother warned me that it was an exercise in pornography and shock for the sake of shocking. I suspected Nabil Ayouch made a deliberately graphic film, orchestrating the very polemic it caused while shielding his marketing ambitions with "cinema verité" and Abidar was the sacrificial lamb. As if things weren't bad enough for Arabs in 2015, did we need a film to highlight our own hypocrisy with the taboo of sex and prostitution? That's how I was thinking, failing to realize that if Abidar was treated like a wh**** , that totally justified a film about women constantly regarded as below the standards of human dignity.
The film doesn't dignify prostitution but exposes it in its naked (or half-naked) opening with a long conversation that sets the tone. The subtitles do their jobs al by telling you what they say and they don't sugarcoat the profanities. However they might affect a Moroccan viewer who'd never hear a girl use these terms in society. I remembered my cousin telling me that boys have no idea how girls talk when they're together, I was shocked at the thought that they used the same words to define anatomical attributes, but hey, what was I expecting?. As Abidar's character Noha tells her chauffeur : "do you expect us to talk in poetry?".
But there's more beyond the first verbal shock, these girls talk about their customers and seem to enjoy the moment because just for once, men become the objects ... of mockeries and laughs. You can tell that these conversations have a sort of cathartic effect and operate like a little pep talk before action, when their chauffeur Said, played effectively by a laconic Abdellah Didane drives them to a nightclub without paying attention. It's a movie about sex workers and naturally, they don't operate by themselves, they know cab drivers, bouncers, barmen, cops and like in Scorsese's "Casino", we see all the ramifications of the underworld.
The first act culminates in an extended orgy with a group of inebriated Saudis, there's no need describing every detail but while I was watching these girls humiliating themselves, shaking their bottoms, playing with their bodies, I was thinking "why would anyone dismiss this film?" "how could it show that reality otherwise?". No 'good' citizen is aware of the existence of these practices, and it's a long overdue wake-up call for Moroccan society to realize the collateral damages of tourism. I'm sad that one of the reputations that Moroccan girls brought to themselves was how 'easy' they are, making a city like Marrakesh the Mecca of ... and yes, I'm censoring myself.
But Ayouch avoids the victim card and acknowledges that for some girl it's a choice driven by economical needs but a choice nevertheless, if they want to leave the great life or open a business (a former pro opened a hair salon after making money in the whole Middle-East... and she wasn't a housemaid). These girls have ambitions and personalities of their own, their solidarity constantly challenged by arguments about money, rent, and sharing the orange juicer. If Abidar has the most substantial role as Noha who brought shame to her house and let her son leaving with her mother, her arc is perhaps the most heartbreaking and overarches the calvary endured by these girls.
There's Halima Kairaouane as Randa who's got a boyfriend as a street bum and gives herself for free, showing that sex isn't always a matter of money, she's the most capable of love as implied with her infatuation with a Saudi client... but the romance will turn rapidly sour in a way that finds an eerie echo with the aggression of Abidar. And there's Asmaa Lazrak as Randa whose dream is to go to Spain. It's hard to have four substantial characters and her character never rally pays off, except for a moment when she has her first time with another woman and I didn't understand Ayouch's choice to cut it, since we never really see how that affected her.
The great addition however is the rural pregnant girl who is totally unglamorous and vulgar and sells her body for bags of vegetables, she's the target of her friends' mockeries but she knows how to put them in their place. It's one of these last-minute characters who gives another dimension to a film. Once the quartet is formed, there's a sense of cohesion and completeness, we see these girls sticking together and understand why prostitution could never stop to exist and any woman can fall into this... and condemn herself to a social ban, along with homosexuals (a subject the film hovers on)... ironically, men get away with it... and yet, they're only the demand that makes the supply.
I liked the film better than I thought, first the performances were flawless and didn't just involve dancing and lascive positions. Secondly Ayouch has a way to express many things through dancing: sometimes, it looks like fun, sometimes it's too forced not to look like a personal downfall à la 'Requiem for a Dream'. The film reminded me these girls dressed like Sharon Stone in hotels where I spent vacation with my family. A few years later, I saw them with the hotel bar manager while I was only playing pool.
And if I ashamed that I could anticipate that the two French tourists who thought they would have the girls because they paid the drink, would get nothing but I feel more ashamed to have judged the film before watching it, it was insightful, dark, shocking, humorous and surprisingly moving.
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