Adam (2019)
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Adam Movie Review
Adam is a 2019 Moroccan drama film directed by Maryam Touzani and starring Lubna Azabal. It is an uneventful, but pleasingly tender movie.
Alba, a widow and parent to a young girl, runs a home-based bakery. When Samia, a pregnant woman, arrives to seek help, Alba’s life changes forever. This is a very sweet, but slow and uneventful slice-of-life tale from Morocco that benefits from its strong characterization and emotional engagement.
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The women here are both very well developed and well contrasted in personalities while still managing to form a strong bond between each other. That bond is the driving force of the story and just the conversations that they share were so endearing and touching.
The performances are uniformly strong and so is the directing from Maryam Touzani, one of the more promising rising talents from this country in recent years. She has a great knack at creating an atmosphere as the movie is highly charming and cozy to experience.
My biggest issue with Adam has to be its far from involving nature. For a movie that is only around one and a half hours long, it felt much longer due to that slow pace that robbed it of ever garnering any momentum whatsoever. Not to mention that the film failed to develop a richer, more ambitious storyline.
Yes, Adam deals with femininity, the inherent misogyny of Muslim countries and just how strong women have to be there to cope with their numerous hurdles, but it never went beyond that to criticize the society and the country at hand. It is too concerned with these two women, thus it was too intimate and limited in scope.
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The cinematography is very good and the movie has a memorable color palette and a beautiful emphasis on food and its ability to bring people together. Again, it functions pretty much as a slice-of-life tale in that regard for better and for worse. It just needed a bigger conflict at the center as it is devoid of any more meaningful or dramatic arc.
Adam is a Moroccan drama that benefits from a beautiful bond that develops between its two female protagonists. It’s a feminist slice-of-life tale that is very cozy and charming, but it lacked any more meaningful or more dramatic narrative arc, thus limiting its scope significantly. It is very endearing, but also rather leisurely paced and never quite garnering any momentum.
My Rating – 3.5
