L'Enfance Volée

The Moroccan 'servant' phenomenon is like prostitution, without approving the existence, we'd understand the reasons. Allow me to elaborate: when Morocco became independent, so did Moroccan women, they went to school, got jobs and left the house, leaving a void to be filled certainly not by men. Mediterranean machismo was and is still running. The modern women's liberation forced others from rural areas to work as 'helps', doing shopping, cooking, laundry, chores, taking care of children... They were called 'bonnes' in French, a diminutive of "bonne a tout faire", literally 'good at doing everything". Not all were abused or mistreated but all were disregarded by society, including women. Wearing their trademark foulards, aprons and sandals, they formed a professional class as instantly identifiable as taxi drivers or parkings watchmen.

I alreadyI talked about the servant I grew up with in my "Roma" review but I had to write this preamble because this time, the film takes place in Morocco and context is crucial to understand Hakim Nouri's 1994 "Stolen Childhood", the harrowing martyrdom of a young girl named Rkia. The film opens with a jovial bearded matchmaker (Mustapha Zaari) promising Rkia's peasant father that the girl's new boss is wealthy. The father's not too enthusiastic but times are tough, the drought is persistent and children are assets meant to be valuable in a way or another. The mother's lack of answer comes off as a blasé defensive mechanism from someone who knows her opinion isn't worth more the donkey's.

Rkia is a girl of few words but her piercing eyes steal "Stolen Childhood"; she eavesdrop the negotiation, understands her childhood is over and as a symbolic ritual buries her doll while the film's ominous music plays like a sacrificial chant over innocence being murdered. The music switches to something more pop-like fitting the sight of luxurious villas of Casablanca's upper-district. Rkia is taken to the bearded man's headquarters where she discovers he's basically a modern-day Fagin selling orphans to beggars and in a truly tragicomically Dickensian moment, he scolds a child for not crying enough with his appointed mother and even further when he finally starts crying.

Rkia is taken to her new headmistress Salma, and I remember my initial shock in the 90s when I saw Fairouz, one of the most beloved kids show TV hosts, playing such an abusive woman. Salma is the archetype of the Casa socialite: she smokes, talks in French (in Moroccan cinema, that means "bourgeois"), classy with the rich and crass with the poor. Interestingly, the hiring of Rkia upgrades the status of the servant Zhor (Zhor Slimani) who reveals herself to be as tyrannic as her mistress. Hakim Nouri, a former civil servant is much aware of the clash of classes in Morocco and painted the sad reality of people trying to have their share of the Moroccan dream by bossing around the lower ones. It's an Arabic term called 'Hogra'.

There are some powerful moments, so much that they didn't always needed that recurring theme to assist them. Rkia's eyes said everything, from the way she looked at a cotton candy vendor as if he made something out of a magic wand to her heart consumed by frustration while watching kids in school, from behind the metallic gate that (like her bedroom) enclosed her in a cell-like life. There are three times where Nouri gets so carried away by her predicament that he slightly flirts with caricature: Salma's daughter Nawal (who wears too short a dress for her age) behaves like a girl from "Little Princess Sarah", it's also hard to believe a big man like the father would let a frail girl carry his luggage, or that every child would dare ride on Rkia's back during a birthday party.

I think the film might have benefitted from some reliefs bringing us faith on human nature instead of saying that all the rich are cruel. I liked the scenes with Zhor better, her devilish hypocrisy when she praises the 'modern world' for gender equality while toying to some ephemeral privileges when her mistress was absent. The little actress is good too, and while I didn't care much from the dream scenes, I adored the one where she tastes jar contents on that wonder called a fridge only to end on mustard and her reaction was just a marvel of silent comedy, in the same vein as the Charlotte Russe scene in Sergio Leone's "Once Upon a Time in America". In fact, Nouri borrows many elements from De Sica's "Bicycle Thief" or "Shoeshine", with the heartbreaking beach climax in the beach where a dog has a parasol and not R'kia. At that point, I wish she just could pull a "400 Blows" and the film to end there.

But to justify his title, Nouri needed to cover a part with adult Rkia. Granted it shows how constantly mistreated and abused servants are, even as props for spoiled boys' appetites... that part needlessly drags to its predictably pessimistic conclusion. Touria Alaoui is superb but it's hard to believe that she is that same little girl or that the two stories are the same though the film connect them in an ironically tragic twist at the end. There's a lot in that second part, a sloppy romance with a loser, women working in factory and making ends meet through prostitution, religious hypocrisy, clandestine pregnancy and so on and so forth... so much that at the end we're just emotionally exhausted.

The film was a shocker in its time and deservedly so. But retrospectively, I wonder if it wouldn't have worked better as a two-parter. There was so much to cover with childhood instead of relying on little emotional vignettes before a second part showing realities that Moroccan cinema never snubbed. It's also a miscalculation for the film was forbidden to children under 10 because of the adult segment while there are so many lessons they could learn from little Rkia.