By Donald H. Harrison
SAN DIEGO – You remember seeing the movie Casablanca with Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman? That was the myth. The Moroccan film Razzia (Raid) by Nabil Ayouch paints the reality of an economically depressed society where militant Islam seeks to impose its values on Berbers, women, homosexuals, and, to a lesser extent, Jews.
There are a number of interwoven stories. A science teacher in a Berber village, who was forced to teach children in Arabic, even though they don’t understand it, leaves the village to lose himself in Casablanca. A woman who loves him goes to Casablanca hoping to find him. She becomes a friend to a much younger woman, who feels repressed by a society that taunts her because she refuses to cover her head and skin. Meanwhile, the Berber woman’s son, Ilyas, works for “Mr. Joe” in a restaurant that features a large Hollywood Casablanca poster. “Mr. Joe,” aka Joseph, commiserates with his father Jacques about the diminishing number of Jews who live in Morocco. A prostitute with whom he has had sex in his car, refuses to have anything further to do with him after he takes her home and she sees on his walls Jewish pictures and plaques. A teenage girl, whose socialite mother often leaves her in the care of a nanny, hungers for physical love, wherever she might find it.
The photography of this movie, which comes out on DVD on July 24, is arresting, particularly those scenes shot in the Atlas Mountains, which are home to traditional Berber communities. Scenes of students rioting in the streets of Casablanca because they have earned master’s degrees but can find no jobs, and of fundamentalist Muslims protesting any proposed change to Sharia law, help viewers to understand the seething frustration that seems so out-of-place alongside Casablanca’s beautiful beaches. But you can’t feed your family on sand, nor can you enrich your mind amid rigid dogma.
The main critique of this movie is that in trying to tell so many stories in one film, Ayouch didn’t do justice to any one of them.
See if you agree.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.c.om