Casablanca Beats, review: a simplistic tale of conservatism versus hip-hop energies

• Dir: Nabil Ayouch. Cert TBC, 102 mins

One of the reasons Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca lingers so long in the soul is its use of song: ‘As Time Goes By’, and ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ giving way to a skin-prickling rendition of ‘La Marseillaise’. But that was 1942 – and of course not actually the Moroccan port at all, but a romantic approximation of it built at Warner Bros Studios in Burbank.

The new feature from the French-Moroccan director Nabil Ayouch, which premiered in Cannes tonight, shows the modern city’s streets resound to very different music. Its English title is Casablanca Beats, and its French one Haut et Fort: this could be translated as “Loud and Clear”, which would also be a fair characterisation of the film’s relentlessly perky, earnest and simplistic approach.

It follows a group of youngsters in the unglamorous north-eastern suburb of Sidi Moumen, whose local community arts centre has taken on a surprising new member of staff. His name is Anas (Anas Basbousi), and he’s a former rapper, now hoping to nurture the talents of the next generation by teaching a course in hip-hop.

As he saunters in with his shaved head, camouflage jacket and bag of paint cans, he looks less like a tutor than a student – specifically, one who’d find himself hauled in front of the headmistress before his first day was out. And this is more or less what happens: when the centre’s middle-aged manager checks to see how he’s settling into the music room, she finds him spraying the word “vibes” on the wall in capital letters, and looks as if she already regrets the appointment.

Seemingly for the benefit of the audience as much as anyone else, Anas’s students – all played by nonprofessionals using their own names – keep describing Sidi Moumen as Casablanca’s Bronx, the New York City borough where hip-hop blossomed in the 1970s and 1980s. For these kids, the culture feels like theirs to inherit, both as a possible path to fame and fortune and a way to vent in the present. (If you thought rap could sound brusque in English, wait until you hear it in Arabic.) But for Anas, it’s a revolutionary tool, and he speaks passionately about the centrality of rap to the Arab Spring. When your rhymes find an audience, your voice is heard.

The film largely consists of the same three scenes on rotation: classroom squabbles about social and religious issues; vignettes from the students’ personal lives; and writing and performance sessions, in which you’d have to concede the results tend to be spirited rather than great. The English versions of their lyrics usually only sort-of rhyme and sort-of make sense (the project must have been a subtitler’s nightmare). And the discussion sections, while owing an obvious tonal debt to Laurent Cantet's 2008 Palme d’Or winner The Class, lack shape and direction, and feel more like videos of acting workshops than fully realised scenes.

You end up cherishing the occasional enlivening bursts of local colour, such as a solo rooftop dance sequence during the evening call to prayer, or a brief scene in which a middle-aged woman tentatively picks her way through another dance routine that’s broken out in an alleyway. Yet far more often, Ayouch and his cast end up wading back through the clichés that have haunted this mini-genre since the days of Fame and Footloose: the enraged conservative parents, the first sparks of political consciousness and their tinderbox consequences, the outcast, beaten-down young woman rediscovering her voice.

An end-of-term concert brings things to a head, with angry male relatives barking “You teach them filth!” outside while rattling the doors. Of course it’s impossible not to be on the side of Anas and his students – Casablanca Beats just about gets by on restless teenage energy and its bustle of winning young faces. But it’s a new arrangement of a very familiar old song.

Screening at the Cannes Film Festival. A UK release has yet to be announced