Beyond Casablanca: M.A. Tazi and the Adventure of Moroccan Cinema

Beyond Casablanca: M.A. Tazi and the Adventure of Moroccan Cinema. By Kevin Dwyer. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2004. Pp. ix, 433; 33 illustrations. $65 cloth, $24.95 paper. Anthropologist Kevin Dwyer's study of Moroccan director Muhammad Abderrahman Tazi strives to be neither a history of Moroccan cinema, nor an inquiry into contemporary Moroccan culture, nor a critique of the filmmaker's body of work. Instead, Dwyer is intent on "placing us in the filmmaker's world, exploring how that world may have come about, rendering us sensitive to its most crucial issues, and constructing from this complexity a 'story' that can be communicated from place to place" (p. 320). To keep this "close-up" of Tazi's life and works authentic both in tone and language, Dwyer allows the director's own words as much space as possible: most of this book consists of the verbatim, although edited and arranged, transcripts of sixteen lengthy interviews with Tazi. Through them, Dwyer explores Tazi's career, the difficulties of creating a 'Third World cinema" in an era of globalization, and, above all, the first four of Tazi's films: The Big Trip (1981), the story of a truck driver's journey through Morocco and his increasingly unsettling encounters with locals as he moves northwards; Badis (1989), the tragedy of two women on a small Spanish-controlled island who dare to defy traditional mores; Looking For My Wife's Husband (1993), a comedy about a bourgeois Fez jeweler who foolishly divorces his third wife on a whim and then learns he cannot remarry her unless she has remarried and divorced another man in the interim; and Lalla Hobby (1997), which continues the story begun in Looking as the Fez jeweler emigrates illegally to Belgium in pursuit of his ex-wife's new husband, who has disappeared before the agreed-upon divorce. As Tazi discusses his career and these films, a picture emerges of his personal goals and his beliefs on the role of non-Western cinema. Disgusted by the stereotypical "Orientalist" visions of European and American film makers who come to Morocco to film Arab exoticism, Tazi attempts to depict a multifaceted "Moroccan mosaic," in order to construct self-images for a Moroccan audience "that concern them and give them worth" (p. 67). For Tazi, too many postcolonial Moroccan films focus on rural misery and misogyny. Hence his interest in projecting "a constructive and positive nostalgia," of the strong communal values of traditional Moroccan society, as well as his focus (in Looking for My Wife's Husband, the largest financial success in Moroccan film history) on the wealthy, urban classes of Fez. …