‘The Blue Caftan’ Review: A Standard Drama Stretched to Interminable Length

thewrap.com:

“The Blue Caftan,” the second feature from Moroccan writer-director Maryam Touzani, is not exactly packed with incident. It is basically a standard triangle drama that has been stretched out to an interminable length.Halim (Saleh Bakri) and his wife Mina (Lubna Azabal) run a store specializing in caftans in Salé, Morocco and hire an apprentice named Youssef (Ayoub Missioui) to work with them.

Halim steals looks at Youssef nearly right away, and Mina sees her husband looking. Touzani trains her camera very closely on her characters and rarely lets in any outside influences; the majority of the movie takes place inside the shop and also a nearby bathhouse where Halim goes to have furtive sex with men.Touzani’s camera follows Halim and another man to a cubicle at the bathhouse but then cuts after they close the door.

Some time later in the film, when we see Halim at the bathhouse with another man and the door to their cubicle closes, the camera pans down this time so that we see their feet.

In each case, we are kept at arm’s length.Mina is shown praying and Halim counsels Youssef about the ways of the caftan and the art of fine stitching, or what he calls “the maalem’s centimeter.” Mina observes her husband giving their young employee these fabric tips, so to speak, and it is made clear that they have had other male apprentices who have moved on.Touzani’s script parcels out information in such a lackadaisical fashion that a misunderstanding between Mina and Youssef over pink satin, which could have been handled in five minutes or less, takes most of the film to resolve and it doesn’t exactly qualify as an intriguing subplot.We see Mina stroke Halim’s chest in bed at night, which means it is time for them to have bad and.