Review: Dance freedom in Moroccan « Everyone loves Touda ».
Singer Touda lives dangerously, performs alone, dances big laughing with sea -filled lantis who lose the reflection and attack her by force. She lags up and continues, refuses to receive protection, although her lover is a police officer. She only lives for her deaf -mute son and for her song. Preferably Aita, a traditional Bedouin singing style that according to the front texts, « began as a scream and turned into singing » with lyrics about the lusts of the flesh, the sorrow of the soul and the beauty of freedom.
To break through and for the son to receive an education, she leaves the small town in southern Morocco and travels to Casablanca, where she roams through the noisy, glossy metropolis, rigorously dressed in velvet dresses with gold bridge, with carbon black jewelry and heavy jewelry. She forces herself on nightclub scenes and makes everyone dance. She is excited without please, shakes off the banknotes that are pressed into clothes and hair and is thrown out when she demands respect.
The women who Sings Aita is called Sheika, a word that both her own religious brother and the packed uncles on the dance floor make to sound like « whore », but which for Touda and the inserts are something completely different: an art and a cold.
Why do men get so confused by her? What do they do not understand?
« All you ever got to do is be a good man one time to one woman, and that will be the end of the road. » Screams Janis Joplin in « Cry Baby ». It was a line of text that etched in my girl brain early and that comes for me again when I see Touda’s fight (maybe partly because Joplin girls bought the same dresses in the Old Town Patchoulid scented shops in the seventies).
It does not sound like an impossible goal, to be nice once against a single woman, yet I already thought that the desperation in Janis Joplin’s voice was motivated. Because if « Being a good man to a woman » means that he should see her as a person with his own will, his own dreams and his own sexuality, it still does not seem to be able to take in anything other than stains and periodically in history. Then he has to lock in, silence and make her strange again.
Nisrin Erradi Gives Touda enormous vitality and makes her seem to fight for her existence and pride with every breath, however crowded she is. She wears the whole movie, which begins and ends with the main role’s strength. That’s all it is about: Touda, which moves just as freely among the goats at the parents’ cottage in the mountains as on slimy luxury bars, but is very free in a lone dance scene in front of the mirror in a hotel room. A modern, ancient, sad, strong, sexy woman and artist in a world that never seems to wake up.
The red movie poster is misleading like Anoras, where equally black -eyed Mikey Madison dances free and happy but in blue, Western disc light, also she as well as in her own world. Maybe the wild, scary girl dance is back. Revenge of the Dancing Queens.
See more. Three other North African films with women theme: « Papicha » (2018), « The Blue Kaftanen » (2022), « Four Daughters » (2024).
Also read:
Nabil Ayouch: « I want to restore the lost honor of the sheikas »
More Movie reviews and other texts of Kerstin Gezelius
