The year is 1915 in Morocco and two slave girls have just been sold. One, Dow Sabah, is black. The other, Oud Al-Warad, just happens to be the most prodigious Oud player to have hit Morocco in a few centuries. But that does not affect her market value until Master of the house, who also happens to be a musician, discovers her talent.
Then life started getting a bit more complicated for poor old Oud Al-Ward. Before you know it, the Master is giving Oud private lessons; she gets her own private sleeping quarters, gives nightly music recitals for guests, and has managed to win his heart.
Sounds like a fairytale so far – except winning his heart actually meant being raped by him several times. This is early 20th century Morocco, and not the Arabian Nights musical 2007.
The inevitable happens and Oud Al-Ward falls pregnant. Despite her desperate attempts to hide her baby bump with an old rag, the women in the house find out. In a painful and extended scene, Oud is subjected to a forced abortion, where her five-month old fetus is untimely ripped from her womb, and the premature corpse is buried in the garden.
The following scene is an intense and desperate portrayal of utter despair that could only be matched by a Greek tragedy. Oud, blood and sweat streaked over her white bed clothes, claws at the dark soil in the moonlight, pulling up clumps of earth to take out a bundle of death: her aborted child.
Needless to say, severe depression follows. Oud refuses to talk, eat or sleep. Most importantly, she refuses to perform. Master, having developed a conscience, calls for advice from his trusty physician. They eventually resort to the local loony bin, but it is here, in the dark cavernous dungeon, that Oud rediscovers her passion.
After some time, she is delivered from the sanatorium from her bosom buddy Dow Sabah, and she returns to the house. In her absence, the master has fallen ill, with what audiences can presume to be prostate cancer. The house is a disheveled shadow of its former glorious self, and the master lies ill with his oldest son at his side.
The cinematography of this film makes “The Lost Beauty anything but. It is a visual delight, and every shot is a marvel of shadow and light. The costume and set all complement this aesthetic paradise: Characters are robed in pink silks and blue satins, no details being too trivial.
After all, Lahcen Zinoun is a choreographer, dancer, musician and perfectionist. Yet despite this visual and aural fantasy, the fibula is weak. This leaves the audience to assume and fill in some pretty essential details, such as the gradual collapse of the master’s domestic empire. One of Zinoun’s concerns, as he stated in the press discussion following the showing of his film, is the oppression of women. Yet with a tendency in this production to weigh style over substance, the moral impact of the film fails to be realized.
