Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

I first encountered books bylined Mohammed Mrabet (born Mohammed ben Chaib el Hajjem in 1936) published by the Santa Barbara Black Sparrow Press during the 1970s. Of Berber (Beni Ouraaghil people from the Rif Mountains on interior Morocco) descent and illiterate Mrabet told stories that American expatriate in Tangier Paul Bowles taped. The style, though not always the content and not the perspective, seemed suspiciously similar to Bowles's own, and Brian T. Edwards (Morocco Bound) has written that Bowles's Magrhebi Arabic was not good enough to translate, and that Mrabet translated what he'd said and Bowles had recorded into Spanish. In a major sense, then, Mrabet translated himself from Arabic to a European language and Bowles collaborated in the fashioning of an intermediate text before crafting the English ones that were published with shifting credits.

Mrabet is also a painter, whose art has been used on the covers of many of his books (and of Edwards's Morocco Bound. Although they seem to me a bit threatening and very intricate and stylized rather than abstract, I can understand (and laugh at) the description of them as "horrorshow Joan Miro."

Mrabet worked as a golf caddie, then was taken up by Russ and Anne-Marie Reeves, who leased the Hotel Muneria in Tangier during the late 1950s, employing Mrabet as a barman and taking him along when they returned to the US. He did not like life in the US and returned to Morocco in 1960 (he fictionalized the story of his relationship with the Reeveses in Look and Move On, 1976). Smoking kif (hashish/ concentrated THC crystals) plays a major part in many of his stories and novels, including the book titled simply M'hashish (1969).

The Mrabet(/Bowles) novellae The Beach Cafe and The Voice were published in 1980. The former was adapted for the screen by directors Benoît Graffin (Priceless) and André Téchiné (Wild Reeds, Witnesses), directed by Graffin in 2001 and now available subtitled in English on DVD.

"Café de la plage "is not plot driven, but does not have much character-development either. It dispassionately examines a situation in which a young Moroccan not native to Tangier, Driss (Ouassini Embarek, Right Now, The Good Thief) is a gypsy taxi driver and scavenger, who sleeps in his car, and spends time (too much time in her mother's view) with Betsoul (Leïla Belarbi) a peroxided blonde who dresses in European manners (that is scandalously to the head-scarfed neighbor women in ankle-length garments).
On a rocky Atlantic beach 12 kilometers south of Tangier, Driss sets out to befriend a grizzled misanthrope named Fouad (Jacques Nolot, L'arrière pays, Before I Forget) who has a rudimentary (one-table) café and a cottage to rent out.

At the risk of being accused of plot-spoiling, I have no more insight into why Driss seeks companionship with Fouad at the end of the movie than during the first meeting in which Driss shares kif with Fouad, who nonetheless charages Driss for the mint tea they share.
Fouad demands that if Driss return, he bring mint. Driss remarks that there is mint everywhere, but nonetheless brings a large bunch of it when he returns.

Driss wants to increase business. Fouad's sons do not want to do any work, and Fouad is not exactly radiating hospitality even to those who venture to his café.

Back in Tangier, Betsoul's mother goes off for three months, and Driss stops sleeping in his car. Bestoul asks if he likes sleeping in a bed better than in his car. He says he prefers the freedom of his car, but likes sleeping with her.

Bestoul has a more conventionally garbed friend with whom she is willing share Driss, but he is not interested.
Fouad badmouths Driss to anyone who asks about him. Rather than being at all grateful for the presents Driss always brings along, Fouad sees them as flaunting wealth. He also says that Driss sells himself at high prices to be sodomized by foreigners (which does lead to a woman paying for sex with him, though I don't think she sodomizes him).

There are lots of waves, and lights of Tangier from a building site from which Driss sometimes lifts what is not bolted down. Driss serves as guide for a suspicious American couple with a bored daughter in tow. He teaches them how to extract potent kif. He does not have sex or even any flirtation with them.

Is there a point? I don't think so. Just a portrayal of a very long-faced young man getting by and dealing with some unpleasant elders, local and foreign, with more opportunities for sex than he wants.
Those interested in Mrabet(/the Mrabet Bowles collaboration) will find the movie irresistible, but I suspect most others will find it puzzling, though sometimes entertaining in the vehement nastiness of Fouad and the refusal to take the paths of least resistance by Driss. The sand and sea look beguiling (more so than south in Mauritania in "Waiting for Happiness": no one swims there and a corpse washing up on the beach...)

The Picture This! DVD has trailers for ten other, mostly French, movies, but no bonus features relating to the movie—alas, since I'd have liked to hear from Mrabet and/or his adapters.

©2010, Stephen O.Murray

Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD