The Damned Don’t Cry: ‘After a few days of being shy, the cast was like: my character would never, ever say that’

The Damned Don’t Cry is a lesser-spotted – and delicious – 1950 film noir directed by Vincent Sherman and starring Joan Crawford as Ethel Whitehead, a housewife and mother who leaves her small town behind after her young son is killed in an accident. Relocating to the big city, Ethel adopts a new identity, styling herself as socialite Lorna Hansen Forbes, and finds various wealthy suitors in the world of organised crime.

“He’s promised the world, Marty, and I’ve got to have it,” she tells the mob accountant (who she instructed to take the job) as she moves on to his boss.

Fyzal Boulifa, one of British cinema’s exciting young talents, has borrowed the name – and just a smidgen of movie DNA – for his remarkable second feature, The Damned Don’t Cry.

“My film was never intended to be really modelled on the earlier film in any way,” says Boulifa, a diehard Joan Crawford fan. “I just really loved the title and then something of the spirit of that film. Because there’s something about this kind of melodrama and the metamorphosis of the characters. It’s episodic and almost unstable in structure. It connects to earlier 19th-century novels that are modelled around the story of x. The character corrupts herself to ensure survival in America. My film is set in Morocco, which is very working class and really quite poor. For many people, life is improvisation, and everything is necessitated by a need to survive. Those connections interested me.”

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In Boulifa’s The Damned Don’t Cry, Fatima-Zahra (played by Aïcha Tebbae), is a middle-aged single mother who leads a nomadic, complicated life with her teenage son, Selim (Abdellah El Hajjouji). A fallen woman of the old school, she is perennially packing up and moving on between failed or humiliating encounters. She is barely tolerated during a brief sojourn in her native village.

Mother and son find themselves in Tangiers, where, for a moment, things are looking up. Fatima-Zahra charms a respectable and devout bus driver, Moustapha (Moustapha Mokafih), a married man with an ailing wife. Selim, meanwhile, meets Sébastian (played by Antoine Reinartz), a rich French man who initially hires the unsuspecting young man for sex before offering him a live-in position as a housekeeper. Of course, things don’t go to plan.

“Fatima-Zahra was inspired by an auntie,” says Boulifa, whose Bafta-shortlisted short film The Curse was similarly inspired by one of his mother’s girlhood experiences in Morocco. “What I remembered about this auntie was that no matter what s**t she was going through or how poor she was, she would always inspire jealousy in other people by doing little things that showed that she was refined. And there’s a kind of grace and something very charming and touching about that, and that was quite of the state of the character. I was also thinking about Anna Magnani in Pasolini’s Mamma Roma and exuberant town characters like that.”

The thing everybody tells you is that street casting works if it’s children or teenagers. Adults are more complicated. And that’s true

Boulifa, who grew up in a working-class estate in Leicester, placed adverts in local newspapers and online seeking non-professionals for the casting of his powerful debut feature, Lynn + Lucy. In common with The Damned Don’t Cry, the director’s debut is powered along by two terrific performances from newcomer Roxanne Scrimshaw and Nichola Burley. Street casting for The Damned Don’t Cry was a trickier venture.

“The thing everybody tells you is that street casting works if it’s children or teenagers,” says Boulifa. “Adults are more complicated. And that’s true. With Lynn + Lucy, I was casting someone quite adult and contained. This time around I needed someone who was an adult, but also really charming and full of life. It felt impossible at some point. Because I wanted a non-professional who was kind of a performer. There was huge pressure to use an actress, which I resisted. Which had consequences for the production. And then I saw Aïcha and she was incredible and I really wanted to work with her. I didn’t see her as the lead because the part was written much younger. I thought we’d find a smaller part. But then she kept coming back.”

He laughs: “I relied on my actors so much. It was more than them being appropriate for the script. It was a different level. My Arabic is not good enough to pick up the nuance of the language. And after a few days of being shy, the cast was like: my character would never, ever say that!”

Partly inspired by the works of Bruno Dumont, a director who is apt to cast movie stars alongside psychiatric patients, Boulifa remains committed to the idea of performers who convey by being. However, the already difficult business of street casting was further complicated by the new film’s sometimes explicit content. Homosexual acts are illegal in Morocco and punishable by up to three years in prison.

“Going in I assumed it would be easy to cast the mother and difficult to cast the boy,” says the filmmaker. “Actually, we found Abdellah very early in the process. I was very concerned about him taking the role because he was so cool about it. Obviously, we needed to be quite discreet, so we only talked to people who were very interested in the film. I sat down with Abdellah for three hours and went over the story. He’s like, yeah, amazing, I’ll do it. And I started interrogating him about it, almost trying to put him off. What will you do if there’s a scandal? What will you do if your mother’s neighbours kick-off? But he has a rebellious, slightly subversive streak. And he saw the film as highlighting the hypocrisies of Moroccan society. He was into that idea. You can’t make guarantees. You hope that the actors know what they’re going into. And that they might get some s**t but they get a lot of respect as well. Overall, it’s had a positive impact, I think. Abdellah called me from Marrakesh to say: ‘I can’t leave the hotel because everybody keeps stopping me to tell me what an amazing actor I am.’ ”

It’s difficult to pinpoint Boulifa in contemporary British cinema. Lynn + Lucy was co-produced by Ken Loach’s company, Sixteen Films, but draws equally from Loach’s social realism, Greek tragedy and works of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. The Damned Don’t Cry feels adjacent to a certain school of contemporary French cinema – notably Léa Mysius’ Five Devils, Lola Quivoron’s Heal the Living, and Mati Diop’s Atlantics – that ignites from the friction between verité and hot-blooded Sirkian tropes.

The potent family dynamics of Boulifa’s script are amplified by Egyptian musician Nadah El Shazly’s emotive score and Caroline Champetier’s lush cinematography. Champetier is the César-winning director of photography behind Of Gods and Men, Holy Motors, and the Adam Driver musical Annette.

There is a strange reverence for cinema in Morocco. Because all the Hollywood action movies and biblical epics are shot there. It’s taken very seriously as a source of employment

“One of the great things about Caroline is that she’s so knowledgeable about the history of cinema,” says the director. “So it’s very easy to talk about films and references. We’re on location and we don’t have a big budget. And I’m saying the film is going to fall somewhere between melodrama near realism. Caroline has made over 100 films. I’ve made one. She can digest everything and make it work because she has the intelligence and experience.”

In 2010 Boulifa’s debut short film, The Curse, won best short film at the Directors’ Fortnight section of Cannes. The film tells the story of a young girl, Fatine, who is ostracised by her community due to rumours about her personal life. It fits with his subsequent work and its preoccupation with marginalised characters who operate on a bigger register. It also brought the filmmaker to Morocco, where his parents came from, and where he returned for The Damned Don’t Cry.

“In Morocco, there’s an interesting relationship with cinema,” says Boufila. “People don’t really go to the cinema. My mother saw the odd Bollywood film growing up. TV is the big thing there. I never wanted to make a film in Morocco. But I went to shoot my mother’s story there. There is a strange reverence for cinema. Because all the Hollywood action movies and biblical epics are shot there. It’s taken very seriously as a source of employment. And then there’s the French influence. So everyone is totally committed to your film. Walk into the street and there’s absolute respect.”

The Damned Don’t Cry opens June 8th