Review: “Le Bleu du Caftan”, between sensuality and taboo

Le Bleu du Caftan, a 122-minute fiction film directed by Moroccan director Maryam Touzani, tells the story of Halim and Mina, a Moroccan couple, who run a caftan shop and live with the secret of the husband’s homosexuality. The couple lives in harmony with this secret until they decide to take an apprentice in the shop, young Youssef. An arrival that disrupts the life and balance of this couple. Between Mina’s jealousy and her illness their balance is threatened. But, the love and acceptance that bind this couple takes over. The three characters of the film manage to face their fears and live with this secret.

Le bleu du caftan opens with a close-up on a hand that caresses with care a blue fabric, the plan grows gradually so that we discover the face of Halim, a man in his fifties, who continues to explore this fabric with an almost sensual softness. This first scene which is accompanied by a soft music plunges us already in a particular atmosphere. The making and embroidery of this blue kaftan, a century-old art in the Eastern world, is the thread of the film. The presence of this blue fabric at the beginning of the film is justified throughout it because this fabric is the blue caftan evoked in the title of the film and its aesthetic role in dramaturgy is justified when Halim, at the death of his wife Mina, remove the white shroud from which she is dressed to finally put this blue kaftan going against Moroccan traditions which earned her the rejection of her family. Halim, who is a maalems -Moroccan craftsman- and therefore someone supposed to be attached to the tradition, finds himself rejected by his own and must bury his wife without a crowd as is customary. An isolation that is even more noticeable in this sequence because at the beginning of the film the director makes us live a sequence of mourning with her huge funeral procession. Only Youssef the new apprentice with whom he began a love affair is at his side.

We can therefore question the problem of rejection and acceptance of certain practices by Moroccan traditions. Halim by this gesture wishes to affirm and certainly confirm his vision of freedom in the choices of life and to comfort himself in his homosexual tendencies and practices that he has long fled in family secrecy and as is often said each family has its secret. The last scene of the film confirms this: we can see Halim and Youssef sitting together as a couple in a bar gathering only men, certainly those who assume their belonging to the homosexual tendencies thus presented, We can deduce that the director gives her point of view through this end, so we are free of our choices and our affiliations.

Concerning the technical aspects, the construction of the plot and the composition of the plans without forgetting the sound quality, the lighting and the editing, it is clear that the director has won her bet, all these technico-artistic elements are well led and the poetics is put forward in the narratology the editing and the acting. Set of elements that certainly led to the selection of this film at the Ecrans Noirs festival 2023 (the film won the critics’ prize, the Soumanou Vieyra Prize, initiated by the African Federation of Film Critics) and well before the selection of the film in 2022 at the Cannes Film Festival in the category a certain look.

Although the subject is veiled, but clearly perceptible in the film, and since it goes against the morals of Cameroon which condemns this practice, one can ask the question about censorship in national festivals. Why was the film about homosexuality part of the official selection of the festival Écrans Noirs? The question remains unanswered. However, the theme of the film does not alter its quality, it is a film that meets the hopes and technical and aesthetic expectations of a beautiful cinematographic work.

Yolande WELIMOUM

Critique de cinéma