One would imagine, after watching the second season of the Moroccan series “Salmat Abu Al Banat” (2021), directed by Hisham Al Jabbari, that Moroccan drama has become in its generality social, and is dominated by a superficial suspense character, which makes the author move from one tale to another, without taking into account its technical and aesthetic conditions. Nor its historical context in which it emerged, or even the visual pattern, in which the image is controlled and the artwork is imprinted with it.
The image, with its different colors and representations, remains hostage to belonging and rooting within a specific context. The successful series, artistically and aesthetically within the Arab world, are the ones that are keen to dive into their reality with what it knows of convulsions and disturbances, not to borrow another reality that expresses it visually according to a policy that takes a double dimension in photography. And capturing the remains of reality, and therefore, does not present the true face of the image of that society, by virtue of the fact that the premises, which established the artistic awareness of the image, were not correct and were marked by a lot of confusion. Read also This is how terrorism, violence and death swept the Iraqi drama in Ramadan Intense local drama in Ramadan… Do Moroccans reconcile with their channels?Tunisian drama..from popular fiction comedy to Hollywood violence”Libyan Drama”… An artistic revolution that breaks the shackles of tyranny, war and terrorism
societal
problems
Despite the keenness of the director of “Salmat Abu Al Banat” to start from the Moroccan social reality within a particular family, the process of imagination remained absent, so that we find many episodes marked by repetition and titillation of feelings, without any effort at the level of dialogues.
The dialogues were normal, simple and spontaneous, and did not respond to the strength of the story and its potential to open a great visual debate within the Moroccan family, law and civil society, not to provide solutions, so that the TV director is not required to delve into issues related to the social world.
The director of the series was required to adhere to the element of imagination, which makes “Salmat Abu Al Banat” an artistic and imaginative work, instead of relying on the element of suspense of the story and its intertwined events, and this is not new at all within Arab drama, especially since the various social dramas are characterized by this overlap and intermingling , between the sub-stories and the parent tale.
The distinguished TV director is the one who is good at using this narrative intensification, in a visual style that achieves a kind of intellectual harmony and visual rhythm, instead of resorting to excessive suspense and the abundance of events without dramatic significance, which makes these elements negatively affect the visual discourse, as happens in “Salmat Abu girls.”
Unfocused tale
In the series “Salmat Abu Al Banat” we see a constellation of well-known faces within Moroccan drama, but some of them were unable to open any horizons for the text at the level of performance, due to the mediocrity of the text and the ineffectiveness of its author in carving characters to the extent that they appear in dozens of scenes without a cultural or ideological reference that is established Her consciousness and her path within the story.
Characters enter and others come out without any visual consistency that gives the story its effectiveness and makes the dramatic text solid in its structure and strong in its perceptions and visions.
This matter, the author does not notice at the moment of writing, but it emerges strongly within the space of the image, so that the viewer finds that some episodes of the series, have deviated from their linearity, which constitutes a cacophony within the element of the story, which in turn affects the element of the picture and its aesthetics.
On this basis, social drama remains one of the most difficult genres at the level of imagination, because of the complexity of its tales and its intertwining with other stories, which may affect the content of the dramatic work, if the author does not improve its use, in line with the nature of the dramatic event. The work may become more difficult if the director finds himself, in front of a complex society like Morocco, in its intellectual nature and its social mosaic, which makes the process of disengaging from a political or social presence within a dramatic work extremely difficult and complex.
Double scenario
Obedience to the authority of the story and its events in Salamat Abu Al Banat is the only factor that controls the rise in viewership.
This, and we do not forget that the director on the other hand was able to control these characters and play them between the first and second season, as other characters are absent and others are present, which made the series on the other hand strong in influencing the viewer, with Hisham Al-Jabari’s ability to combine the veteran faces in the drama. Moroccan and new ones are striving to bring about a change in the nature of these Moroccan series, which recently seemed more restricted to certain television faces, in the complete absence of new names.
Within the series, the Moroccan actor Mohamed Khoye re-emerged as a lion to the screen, through his ability to identify with the father’s character, which he embodied in every literal sense, although Mohamed Khoye seems to have created for himself one television portrait of the strong character, as his roles are close to each other and are always imprinted by a kind of Violence, authoritarianism, cunning and force, but in “Salmat Abu Al Banat” his character seems confused between strength and weakness, and this matter was conjectured by the actor and reflected positively on the role, given that the internal artistic contexts of the scenes impose this duality in the performance of the role, between the use of the strength of the body and the violence of its features and between Self-delicacy in the father’s dealings with his daughters.