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The very title of “ Everybody Loves Touda ” poses a kind of challenge to viewers. If everybody loves Touda, dare you not? Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch ‘s forthright musical drama certainly doesn’t permit much room for dissent. From first gilded frame to last, the film is besotted with its eponymous heroine, a fiery small-town singer aspiring to the status of ‘Sheikhat’ — a revered class of diva versed in the poetic traditions of historical Aita music.

With scene after scene conceived to emphasize Touda’s strength of character and depth of talent, it’s just as well star Nisrin Erradi is sufficiently magnetic not to buckle under the weight of the film’s devotion to her. As a dramatic construction, however, Touda is more fabulous than she is intrinsically fascinating, characterized predominantly by determined ambition and glittering, show-must-go-on resolve. Ayouch’s script, written in collaboration with his wife and fellow filmmaker Maryam Touzani (“The Blue Caftan”), showcases these virtues via a somewhat one-dimensional narrative of challenge, triumph, setback and renewal, with the patriarchy as her hulking adversary in all contexts.



But the film holds back from showing us Touda’s soul in its chaotic, capricious entirety — her life as a single mother, in particular, is rather sketchily drawn — and remains most fixated on her in performance mode, where’s she’s fully in her power. When Touda sings, in other words, the film does too. Ayouch�.

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