A specialist on the Middle East and North Africa, particularly Morocco, Dwyer (social anthropology, American Univ., Cairo) set himself the task of investigating the complexities of creative activity in a Third World context by focusing on the Moroccan national cinema and, more specifically, on the life and career of the country's best known film director, Muhammad Abderrahman Tazi. Dwyer devotes a great deal of space and analysis to Tazi's most profitable film, À (A) la recherche du mari de ma femme (Looking for My Wife's Husband), to date the most commercially successful movie ever shown in Morocco. The analysis of this 1994 film makes it sound like a delightful Islamic romantic comedy; the plot could only occur in a Muslim context, hinging on polygamy and the three-repudiation divorce. Dwyer's treatment of Tazi's career is both detailed and contextualized. His interviews with the filmmaker sometimes seem trivial, perhaps even nit-picking, but his estimations of the general position of Third World filmmaking in world cinema, especially in competition with Hollywood, are extremely well documented. The book has copious notes and a useful bibliography. Summing Up: Recommended. Collections supporting study of world cinema at the upper-division undergraduate level and above.July 2005
R. D. Sears
Berea College