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 Ali Zaoua
(2000)
Director:
Nabil Ayouch
Stars: Mounīm Kbab, Mustapha Hansali
Release Company:
Film Movement
MPAA Rating: NR
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Two Boys Running Through Kasbah, Chefchaouen, Morocco
Photographic Print
Becom, Jeffrey
Buy at AllPosters.com
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Having just seen City of God, it was no shock to find Ali Zaoua, prince de la rue far less flashy; Casablanca's street urchins favor rocks over guns. But Buñuel pioneered the same terrain in Los Olvidados over fifty years ago on a low budget, creating one of the most emotionally devastating portraits in film history, so high tech fireworks are not necessary for compelling drama. What surprised me was how emotionally flat Film Movement's latest offering comes across. It's a definite warning sign when I find myself pausing the DVD more than twice to take breaks during a 100-minute film, so my body was screaming that this simple contemporary story doesn't work on all cylinders.
Like a treadmill, Ali Zaoua plays out like a film exercise that goes nowhere. It kills off its most charismatic character early on, when a group of four twelve year olds attempts to break off from Dib's gang, whose unimaginative rallying cry is "Life is a pile of shit." The remaining three boys dump Ali's body into an empty cellar near his beloved port, but then decide to bury him as a "prince" when recalling how he dreamed of sailing off to a private island paradise with two suns. The remainder of the film deals with the boys' efforts to bury their comrade.
Although Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch employs actual street children (termed "chemkaras") for his film, he fails to take advantage of their real struggles, imposing an improbable adult fairy tale on the project. Wielding his agenda, Ayouch ignores the compelling stories his non-professional child actors have to tell and merely uses them as stereotypical props for his own fantasy. Of the major players, only Ali (Abdelhak Zhayra) and Kwita (Mounïm Kbab) are not severely scarred, but no backstories are offered to explain how Omar (Mustapha Hansali) and Boubker (Hicham Moussoune) became disfigured or how Dibs (Saïd Taghmaoui) permanently lost his voice. There're stories to be told in there, but the director/screenwriter needs to dig into the actors deeper to extract it; instead we're held at arm's length while they go through the motions.
Hints of the tough street life appear—rock throwing, an over-the-top puppy-tossing scene, threatened throat slashings, implied sexual molestation—but nothing that remains powerfully ingrained in long term memory, save the unexplained visual impressions of the severely scarred urchins. There's too much reality to fashion a whimsical Wizard of Oz trip to the magic island, complete with a captain who prefers solid wood and large nails to ruby slippers, but Ayouch only briefly flirts effectively with dreamlike qualities and fails to bring in a workable fantasy. The best parts actually involve these moments—some creative animated sequences and Kwita's Disney-like fantasy about an upper middle class girlfriend.
The high production values and good cinematography are essentially wasted on an ill-advised project that can't find its proper focus. Buñuel and Meirelles wisely used feral children in their natural environment to fashion emotionally compelling dramas, but Ayouch ignores the strengths of their films and superimposes his fairytale facade over the grim reality to create a banal bore. A noble experiment, but like the title character who migrated to the port city of Casablanca for its waters, Ayouch was misinformed.
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