Malik
and his shiftless friends cannot blame anyone but themselves for the hash they
make of their lives, but that won’t stop them from trying. Still, official corruption, rampant crime,
and Islamist extremism will not help their prospects any in Faouzi Bensaïdi’s Death for Sale (trailer here), Morocco’s
official submission for best foreign language Oscar consideration, which
screens during the third installment of MoMA’s Mapping Subjectivity: Experimentation in Arab Cinema from the 1960s toNow.
Malik
is on the dole and almost proud of it. He
and pickpocket Soufiane have just welcomed home their drug-dealing best friend
Allal from a short prison stint. Together again, they have no real plan except
more of the same. However, things change
when Malik falls for Dounia, a high class call girl working for a swanky night
club.
When
the crooked Inspector Debbouz (is there any other kind in the port city of
Tetouan?) raids Dounia’s club, Malik cuts a deal, becoming an informer to
secure her freedom. He might be a
snitch, but he is still lazy. Fortunately,
right about the time Debbouz starts strong-arming him information, his friends
start plotting a doomed-to-fail heist.
Actually,
the plan to rob a Christian jeweler would not be so bad, except the newly
radicalized Soufiane is determined to murder their victim as revenge for Israel
and the loss of Andalusia. That makes no
sense to his friends either, leaving Malik rather spooked. In fact, Bensaïdi’s depiction of the
Islamists is pretty gutsy. Deliberately
targeting vulnerable recruits (they rescued Soufiane from a possible lynching),
they clearly operate in much the same manner as a cult. Sale even
features some nudity, of the attractive variety, which might even be more
daring.
Unfortunately,
Bensaïdi’s characters do not have a lot of zip to them. Malik and his running mates are all rather
generic losers: the brooding loverboy, the hulking thug, and the bullied
juvenile delinquent. Mouhcine Malzi
probably fares the best as the savage but calculating Allal. Frankly, Sale’s
supporting cast is more intriguing.
Imane Elmechrafi’s Dounia is quite the alluring femme fatale, while Bensaïdi
himself makes a drily understated villain as Debbouz.
