Everybody Loves Touda

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After Much Loved (2015), which attracted attention and controversy for its frank look at prostitution, the Franco-Moroccan filmmaker Nabil Ayouch continues his eminently political work with this portrait of a woman from the hinterland who goes to Casablanca to become a singer. The single mother of a deaf-mute son, separated from her husband and the ‘sex friend’ of a policeman, Touda decides one day to set off in search of her dream following a rape. But no one was waiting for her in the big city, where jobs as a bar singer or at weddings do not fulfil her ambition of becoming a serious artist, a performer of the ‘aïtas’ of her country, the traditional songs of free women of the past... No doubt due to issues of self-censorship, not everything is clear in this story, whose ellipses appeal a little too much to the audience's imagination. But as always with the filmmaker, the message is clear and its embodiment powerful. Under its paradoxical title (in fact, no one really likes Touda, apart from her son), unfolds a full-blown denunciation of a veritable ‘rape culture’ in a masculinist society that does everything to reduce the heroine to a variety singer with ‘harmless’ lyrics (all she sings about is disappointed love) and a call girl. Admittedly, Nabil Ayouch's art is not as delicate as that of his wife Maryam Touzani (Adam, Le bleu du caftan), who is co-screenwriter here. But he knows how to hit the mark by condemning all hypocrisy, as in the sequence in his room which superimposes Touda's song on the muezzin's call, or in the finale at the home of the country's rich and powerful, at the top of a tower in Casablanca.