There are two heart-wrenching films named The Damned Don’t Cry. One is a Joan Crawford crime-thriller from 1950, the other is a Moroccan melodrama that borrows the title but is certainly not a remake. Written and directed by Fyzal Boulifa, Les damnés ne pleurent pas (its French-language name) instead takes inspiration from the robustness of Crawford’s onscreen performance. “To me, the title sounded better in French than English,” remarks Boulifa. “That lack of sentimentality is to do with survival.”

Boulifa, 38, the director behind the acclaimed 2019 feature Lynn + Lucy, grew up in Leicester, moved to Paris, and then shot The Damned Don’t Cry in Morocco. “I’m very much British but my parents are Moroccan,” he tells me in Curzon’s offices in early June. “We would go back there every summer, and, as an adult, many times I’ll spend half the year there.” Still, the softly-spoken filmmaker considers himself an outsider in Morocco, thus he gravitated towards a mother/son story. “My connection to Morocco is through my mother, so I was able to focus on those characters. I didn’t want to diagnose Morocco as a society.”

Initially set in Casablanca, The Damned Don’t Cry is led by two non-professional actors, Aicha Tebbae and Abdellah El Hajjouji, an effervescent duo who present their emotions to the camera like classic movie stars. “Most actors in Morocco are from a certain bourgeois demographic,” says Boulifa. “So we did street casting, and the reason you want them is precisely because they’re not trained. If you overtrain them, it defeats the point.”

Tebbae takes on the role of Fatima-Zahra, a single mother who sells her body for sex to support herself and her son, El Hajjouji’s Selim, much to the latter’s dismay. Further truths await: Selim overhears that his deceased father, whose photo he carries around, was a fabricated figure; Selim was actually conceived after his mother was raped.

Starting a new life in Tangier, the pair change positions. Fatima-Zahra adapts her persona for a romantic prospect who’s religious and, incidentally, already has a wife; meanwhile, Selim, now old enough to work, is hired for menial jobs by a French businessman, Sébastien (Antoine Reinartz), unaware that the position requires sexual favours, too. At home, in their cramped bedroom, Fatima-Zahra and the towering Selim increasingly resemble a feuding married couple, their bodies cramped together in the same frame. Around them are the swirling colours of Morocco, all lensed by Caroline Champetier, the acclaimed cinematographer known for Leos Carax’s Holy Motors and Annette.

“The Morocco I know through my parents is very working-class,” says Boulifa. “I don’t have exotic illusions about the country. Being British, it’s easier to be more frank about sex and material conditions in Morocco. When you have that capacity, you think: wow, I need to be as honest as I can.”

When writing the script, Boulifa took inspiration from an aunt whose son started earning money for the family after his father’s death. “The kid started taking on the role of a husband,” Boulifa explains. “We witnessed the relationship evolve with this oedipal intensity. He started seeing her through the eyes of society more, like a jealous lover. On her side, she would encourage that relationship. It’s very poetic and touching, the ways in which, because of the context, their love was mingled with crazy fights.” The son once faked his own death, just to witness the mother’s reaction. “It was a test of love.”

However, Boulifa clarifies that there isn’t anything sexual between Fatima-Zahra and Selim, just a Freudian outlook. “A relationship with a mother is always fraught because that’s who brought us into the world,” he says. “Often our personalities are defined by how successfully we manage to separate ourselves from them.”

That Selim emulates his mother’s pathway in terms of sex work is also an indication of colonialisation: Sébastien is a wealthy Frenchman who, while suave and seductive, fully knows that he’s abusing his position of power with a doe-eyed teenager. Then again, “sex work” might not be the correct term, as I learn when I ask Boulifa how much research was involved.

“A relationship with a mother is always fraught because that’s who brought us into the world. Often our personalities are defined by how successfully we manage to separate ourselves from them” – Fyzal Boulifa

“I didn’t do any research,” the director, says with a laugh. “The casting process functioned as research, in a way, because we were meeting people that had done these kinds of things. I’m slightly reluctant to use ‘sex worker’ or ‘prostitute’, because what characterises Morocco, for me, is this sense of improvisation, flexibility, and being an opportunist in order to survive… It’s not necessarily professionalised in the same we think of prostitution in the West.

“Is Selim a rent boy? One review mentioned he’s a rent boy. But he just finds himself in this situation, and uses it to his advantage. To think of them as sex workers in the sense of being professionalised, is a very Western point of view. The boundaries in Morocco are blurrier, partly because sex outside of marriage is illegal…. Of course, there are prostitutes in Marrakech, but they see themselves as professionals. A lot of the women [I met] are from small towns, and poor, and saw it as survival.”

The word “survival” is common throughout our conversation, especially as endurance defines the mother and son’s life choices. Ironically, their method of earning money, forced upon them by their country’s economic situation, is also a source of shame for that same society. “They’re trying to please one another,” Boulifa notes. “But they can’t accept what the other has to do in order to do that, which is the cruelty of the world they live in.

“I was interested in internalised things that are oppressed in society, and the way they enact upon that relationship. When you make that link between social forces, and tell it in a way that’s emotional, that’s what good melodrama is able to do.” What would he define as bad melodrama? “Sensationalism or overemotionalism for the sake of it.”

Like The Blue Caftan, The Damned Don’t Cry depicts gay characters in Morocco, a country where homosexuality is illegal. However, Boulifa insists that the production was relatively smooth, and that his major fear – not landing a non-professional actor to play Selim – was solved by El Hajjouji’s enthusiasm. “Abdellah was very aware of the hypocrisies in Moroccan society,” the director says. “It really appealed to him to unveil them through making the film.”

On Lynn + Lucy, Boulifa hid the script from his first-time actors; for The Damned Don't Cry, he felt his cast needed to know the context and prepare for any potential backlash. “I was very clear that we would get together,” says Boulifa, “and that I would be like, ‘What would you do if this happens? What would you do if this person in your life reacts like this?’ Abdellah was like, ‘I don’t care.’ I was like, ‘No, it’s important to do this.’

“I suppose that shows my prejudices, in a way, of what I expected him to encounter. But actually, as it is with other countries, the regime, the government, the monarchy is one thing. The people are another. We encountered a lot of open-minded people.”

The Damned Don’t Cry is out in UK cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from July 7

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