Autisto ★

“It’s taken from facts which are close to me; (…) inspired by my own experience,” says Jérôme Cohen-Olivar about his entry to the 22nd Marrakech International Film Festival. There the French-Moroccan director-writer’s personal portrait of a strained mother-son relationship, originally conceived as a US-Israeli big-budget co-production with the story taking place in Israel, runs in the section Moroccan Panorama, reserved for local productions. This downsizing to a more contained Morocco-set version could in fact have been Autisto‘s crucial strength. Films about the condition resonating in the title – autism, and in the case of the young main character, profound autism – are still extremely rare in Morocco, though in recent years a few smaller TV productions have popped up. 

Special attention among them went to Rajae Bouardi’s and Jackie Spinner‘s roughly half-hour long documentary Don’t Forget Me about families struggling to meet the needs of their autistic children. The severe lack of accessible resources, the high cost of school education addressing special needs (which Moroccan parents have to pay themselves), and the social stigma as well as prejudice attached to autism may have been what drove the worn-out protagonist to her initial low point. Malika (Loubna Abidar) is a hard-working single mother and round-the-clock caretaker of her adult son Karim (Adnane Rami) who has severe autism. What type of autism Karim actually has and what his intellectual and social competencies are is never quite clear. 

Sometimes he appears to be completely dependent on outside help, then otherwise he nonchalantly manages challenging intimate interactions, such as employing the service of a sex worker. This situation and the issue of people with autism having sexual desires is suggestively implied on the film’s poster worthy of an erotic thriller. Only that the poster features Karim and his mother Malika. This questionable choice becomes exemplary for the many missteps of a plot wavering indecisively between inspirational lesson, fantasy fable, family drama, and romantic telenovela. In the beginning, Malika is clinging to Karim but also fantasizes about murdering him. Since Cohen-Olivar never sufficiently establishes the lack of social and medical support, Malika’s state seems a symptom of her volatile personality.

There is a whole lot of backstory missing here, as Malika must have been barely a teenager when she had Karim, to whom she seems pathologically attached. She showers naked with him, doesn’t mind if he gropes her, and when she catches him once again masturbating publicly, figures he needs sex. There is no differentiated engagement with neurodivergent individuals’ right to a self-determined sexuality, and the challenges intimate physical connections might bring. Instead, the plot seems guided by a chauvinist “all men need it once in a while” idea. Elderly Mahmoud (Ismael Kanater), whom Karim meets by chance in a graveyard, becomes his guide to sexual fulfillment and a sudden inexplicable improvement in his condition.

Mahmoud renames Karim “Autisto” and calls Malika disdainfully “Minnie Mouse.” Still, he just needs a few man-to-man conversations with Karim to turn him into an independent, well-balanced person. And of course, that visit to a sex worker, which is never seen but referred to as what Karim “needed.” Nevertheless, sex work is presented as amoral and narratively wrapped in the same stereotypes as autism. Karim is a combination of several disability stereotypes; the saint (he is literally called “an angel”), the fool, and the child. Always dressed in the same cartoonish outfit, he is defined by the typical movie mannerisms of (fictional) characters with disabilities. Abidar does the most with her character, but her serious performance can’t overcome the limitations of a rather garish part.

A whole unnecessary subplot about Malika’s romantic affairs dilutes the focus on the bizarre ménage-à-trois between her, her son, and Mahmoud. The latter gets much more attention than Karim, whose feelings, thoughts, and motivations are constantly interpreted and imposed by others but never actually explored. In a story that pretends to be about autism and its challenges, the person with autism is reduced to a dramatic vehicle and literally defined by their condition. Though the naturalist settings and gritty color palette suggest social realism, the systemic failure towards people with autism and their families remains largely ignored. Stubborn misconceptions about neurodivergence are indirectly reaffirmed rather than corrected in a film that says all the wrong things about a too little discussed subject.