Maryam Touzani | أزرق القفطان (Le Bleu du caftan) (The Blue Caftan) / 2022, general release 2023

a ballet of fingers, hands, and eyes

by Douglas Messerli     

 

Maryam Touzani and Nabil Ayouch (screenplay), Maryam Touzani (director) أزرق القفطان (Le Bleu du caftan) (The Blue Caftan) / 2022, general release 2023

Maryam Touzani’s Moroccan Arabic-language film The Blue Caftan is a gentle tale about a closeted gay tailor, Halim (Saleh Bakri) who with his wife runs a caftan shop in the medina of Salé, Morocco. However, as Wendy Ide, writing in The Guardian notes:

 

“Halim…is more than a tailor. At the traditional shop in a Moroccan medina that he runs with his ailing wife Mina (Lubna Azabal), he works lovingly and painstakingly, hand-embroidering silks so exquisitely fine they are like wearing air. And in a way, this delicate, precise, time-consuming approach is mirrored in director Maryam Touzani’s film-making, with its focus on tiny details, the fleeting glance, an almost imperceptible brush of skin against skin.”

 

   Halim, working only by hand in the manner of the old masters, is a remnant of the past who, simply because of the long periods it takes him to properly embroider a caftan are frustrating to his impatient modern customers, who are often seeking his costumes for special occasions such as weddings and birthdays with specific deadlines. Yet, Halim the craftsman refuses to take up a sewing machine and work more hurriedly, perhaps missing or skipping his careful stitches. And Touzani’s film, not only mirrors his approach, but incorporates it into her film in its narrative rhythms.

     All moves slowly in The Blue Caftan as Halim carefully folds and cuts the startingly ultramarine blue piece of cloth, as he and his new assistant Youssef (Ayoub Missioui) unspool and weave the gold threads into it, and as they carefully lock eyes over long periods of time, their obvious desire resulting in no movement except for the next careful stitch. This slow pace might do-in most films, but in this case such indolence represents its very essence, a tenuous ballet of the fingers, hands, and eyes that create an almost operatic tension worthy of Tristan and Isolde.

      As she carefully watches over the front desk of the shop, Mina first appears almost as a kind of gorgon, a strong-willed woman keeping a close eye of her husband even if she inwardly knows that his regular trips to the hamman include male sexual activity.

       When the young Youssef shows up early one morning, dressing and showering in the shop, we watch with her how Halim eyes nearly devour the young man’s body, she immediately warning the young man to properly dress and shower at home. At another point, purposely hiding a bolt of fabric, she insists Youssef has stolen it and attempts to fire him. Denying the theft, he challenges her to take it from his already paltry wages.

        For Halim’s part, like so many men locked in cultures in which homosexual desire is forbidden and shamed, the husband has nonetheless come to love his wife, his only sexual transgressions apparently being in the public baths. At one point near the middle of the film, when the two men are almost overpowered by longing, the younger man hugs the elder close for a moment, Halim pausing just long enough to joyfully take in the embrace before demanding that Youssef pick up a thread from the floor.

        We are not in the least surprised when Youssef walks out, too frustrated to continue as his apprentice. He, perhaps like certain members of the audience, cannot any longer abide the slow-boil of their interrelationships.

       Yet it is perhaps at this very moment when we begin to observe that, despite her seemingly cold demeanor and the pain she daily suffers, that there is an entirely different dimension to Mina. At one point, she demands, unlike other women of the community, that Halim take her to a public café, where she too smokes a hookah and yells for the local football team when they make a goal, somewhat amusing Halim while shocking the other men in attendance.

 

       And we also recognize, particularly after Youssef returns to work, that Mina realizes how good the young man might be for her husband after her death, gradually incorporating him into their dinners and their daily activities, as Ide puts it, “weaving” Youssef into the “fabric” of their lives.

         Finally, a gentle love blooms before the two men, as they move into the realm of touch that I described earlier. Youssef, moreover, witnessing Mina’s open sacrifice in almost gifting him her husband, develops a love and respect for her. Strangely, one might almost describe the last days of Mina’s life as representing, without such a word being spoken or even hinted at, a polyamorous affair. If nothing else, they have, without speaking the name, transformed into a kind of family,

each admiring and loving the other as they daily share their lives.

        The major threat of outside forces—except for a strange encounter one day with local police, who demand to see their passports and marriage documents as they return home from an outing together—are their customers, impatient for their finished caftans and seemingly ignorant of the difference between the artful creations of Halim and Youssef compared with those stitched up on sewing machines. What is clear is that the days of the artisan are limited.

        The blue caftan, obviously, has taken far too much time for the woman who has ordered it. And it is an almost revolutionary act that when the two finish it, Mina dying almost at that moment, that Halim dresses his wife in the caftan before they put her on a bier and carry her grandly dressed body together to the cemetery. There is certainly no one more worthy of such a beautiful gown.

        As The New York Times critic Devika Girish nicely summarizes this work: “Touzani’s film becomes an ode to the many kinds of love that persist, even in an unforgiving world.”

 

Los Angeles, December 21, 2023

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (December 2023).