Traitors
Directed by Sean Gullette
Morocco | 2013
Fatalism typifies most popular Middle Eastern films. If there is a woman character of substance, by the end of the film she is either ostracized by her family and friends or married off to someone. It brings to mind a Japanese proverb – ‘The nail that stands up is hammered down.’
In director Sean Gullette’s film Traitors, the feisty woman protagonist Malika (Chaime Ben Acha) is a lead singer in a punk rock band who has become involved with drug smugglers out of her need to pay for an important demo session for her all-female group, the Traitors. In one scene, she is driving a car packed with drugs. Another mule, Amal (Souffia Issami) is riding beside her and reminds Malika of the Moroccan version of the original Japanese proverb, ‘If you’re a nail endure the knocking.’ Interestingly Malika tells her that’s only half the proverb, the rest is – ‘If you’re the hammer, strike.’
Malika is a hammer type of girl, one who defies the pre-ordained fatalism in Arab cinema. The first song she sings in the movie is a take-off of the The Clash’s ‘I’m So Bored with the USA’, except that this time it’s Morocco. Will she survive with her heart, soul and music intact?
Gullette is an actor turned director. He is better known for starring in Pi (1998) directed by Darren Aronofsky. However Traitors conveys an immediacy that suggests Tangier and the Atlas Mountains aren’t just exotic filmic backdrops. It is a place Gullette knows well. He lived there for five years with his wife, Yto Barrada, the artist who founded Cinematheque de Tanger, a lively art and film space in a decaying Art Deco theatre Cinema Rif.
The original version of Traitors was a 30-minute short that previewed in Cinematheque de Tanger on 20 February 2011, coincidently the beginning of a significant uprising by Moroccan youth. As he revealed to Vadim Rizov for Filmmaker Magazine, when the full-length feature film was screened at the Tribeca Film Festival earlier this year, ‘Today, the Moroccan movement for social justice is called the February 20th movement.
‘That was the night that punk broke [through] in Morocco. So the kids had to climb out the windows of their parents’ apartments through a city where the mothers had been marching in the streets against the high prices of the French electrical monopoly, and then the soccer game let out and there was some hooliganism and all the windows in the storefronts were smashed and the ATMs were smashed up. There were cars burning in the streets and all of a sudden it looked like Brixton in sleepy old Tangier. The whole country had woken up overnight.’
Traitors (2013) is informed by the 2011 mass demonstrations in the Middle East. It shows a generation with little or no opportunities. Malika is the daughter of a mechanic and a cleaning lady. When she needs to earn cash fast, she fixes cars and tries to outwit sophisticated European Johns looking for Moroccan prostitutes.
The film moves through the country’s subcultures, the clubs, the drug trade, the youth culture and a frustrated patriarchy. Gullette intensifies the effect by portraying these vistas by using an overlay of sophisticated filming techniques that borrow from music videos and digital cameras. For the drug sequences the director filmed in a hashish village in the Atlas Mountains. From there Malika and Amal embark on a road trip to deliver an illicit shipment for ‘the Haj’, a bully of a man.
Traitors is far from Thelma and Louise; it is much much darker. Initially Malika has only contempt for Amal who has been a mule for a considerable while. But when she learns about Amal’s life and hears the fate of the other young women who have been smuggling drugs, she takes a decision and changes both their destinies. Choice is something women characters don’t get too much of in Arab cinema.
– Malu Halasa
London-based journalist writer and editor Malu Halasa is our writer-in-residence. Keep your eyes peeled for her posts in the run-up and during the festival.
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