AppId is over the quota
By Peter Savodnik
Illustration by Peter Arkle; Everett Collection
At Rick’s Café in Casablanca, among the Moorish arcades, palmettos, and elegant, well-heeled patrons, a piano man plays As Time Goes By on an old Pleyel. The establishment features a mahogany bar, lamps with stained-glass shades, and a popular fig-and-goat-cheese salad. It wouldn’t seem out of place to find Humphrey Bogart surveying the room, or Ingrid Bergman requesting a song from Dooley Wilson, who played Sam in the 1942 film Casablanca. But the role of Sam is here played by a local Moroccan pianist named Issam. Everything about Rick’s, which former American diplomat Kathy Kriger opened in 2004, is designed to channel the film’s glamour, radiating nostalgia for an imaginary past.
Alas, the moment one exits the café and emerges onto a dusty sidewalk, surrounded by crumbling facades and the rusting Peugeots known as petits taxis that wind through the garbage-strewn streets, the illusion evaporates: Casablanca meets Casablanca. With Minister of Youth and Sports Moncef Belkhayat talking up a seemingly quixotic bid for Casablanca to become the first African city to host the Olympic Games, in summer 2028, Casablanca’s leaders are hoping the city can claim the Hollywood glory it never had.
They will be aided in that effort by the millions of global cinephiles who know the city only as Michael Curtiz shot it. “We call it the Casablanca Effect,” says Jean AbiNader, the chief operating officer of the Moroccan government’s lobby shop in Washington, the Moroccan-American Center. “I’ve worked for a lot of Arab countries and generally, when you say ‘Arab,’ the first thing people think of is camels or sand. So if you say ‘Casablanca,’ and the first thing people think of is the movie, that’s great.” AbiNader is untroubled by the disconnect between Casablanca and Casablanca. The association “provides a point of departure,” he says. “It’s an opportunity to rebrand.” Local businesses have seized on the association, selling Casablanca-themed tissue boxes or refrigerator magnets and emulating the film’s aesthetic.
Casablanca has more to recommend it than a movie made 70 years ago with no Arabic-speaking actors. The International Olympic Committee has expressed interest in finally having an African city host the games and may be drawn to Morocco’s relative stability amid uprisings throughout the Arab world. The country enjoyed 4.9 percent growth in 2009, and 4 percent last year. Tourism in the first half of 2010 increased by 10 percent from the previous year. Billboards and office parks line the highway between Casablanca and its airport, and there are gated homes that look distinctly West L.A. with their palm trees, stucco walls, and red-tile roofs, and BMW convertibles in the driveway. Soon a high-speed train will connect the city to Tangier, in the north, and Rabat, the Moroccan capital. Construction has started on a $300 million, 80,000-seat stadium where the final round of the Africa Nations Cup, expected to draw thousands of soccer fans to the city, will take place in 2015.
Ahmed Chami, Morocco’s UCLA-educated minister of industry, commerce, and new technologies, credits King Mohammed VI, who came to power in 1999, with investing in highways, tourism, agriculture, energy, textiles, and aeronautics, and surrounding himself with smart young people—like Chami, 40. “We’re being very proactive,” he says.
This is indeed a propitious moment for Morocco, which is poised to act as a bridge between the West and a tumultuous, changing Arab world, much as Bogie’s gin joint served as a nexus for Vichy officials, Resistance fighters, fez-wearing power brokers, and Nazis. In ancient souks, vestiges of the country’s French colonial past merge with Arab, Berber, and African influences. Waiters at Parisian-style cafés read Le Monde, all while serving traditional Moroccan mint tea with lamb couscous.