Lonely planet

The other night I watched a “made for Netflix” movie with the title Lonely Planet. The plot involves a love story that begins at a writers’ retreat in Morocco. I had read an online review, and I confess that I would never have given viewing it a second thought but for its location. I was curious about where exactly it was filmed and how Morocco would be depicted.

As it turned out, Morocco was simply a backdrop and Moroccans played no essential role beyond local color. No places were identified by name, but many Peace Corps people could easily point out Marrakesh, the foothills of the High Atlas, the Souss Valley, Essaouira, and Chauen.

The writers’ retreat in the film was in reality a boutique hotel, the Kasbah Bab Ourika, roughly an hour south of Marrakesh in the foothills of the High Atlas. I was surprised when the protagonists get into a rental car and leave for a day excursion, next are pictured in Chauen, and then return to where they began at nightfall. That must have been some one-day excursion! In case your knowledge of Moroccan is fuzzy, the roundtrip drive would have taken a minimum of 16 hours assuming the start was at the Kasbah Bab Ourika. Verisimilitude was not a feature of the movie.

In the nineteen sixties, the kind of luxury represented by the writers’ retreat did not exist outside of cities. The Kasbah Bab Ourika was not built until 2004. Travelers were lucky to find any comfort outside of a city, and, if one did, it was most likely a remnant of colonial times such as Au sanglier qui fume southwest of Marrakesh. Just the same, on a cold, windy, rainy night, if one had just arrived, hungry and tired from a long, winding, and unpaved drive over Tizi n Test, Au sanglier qui fume would have offered decent food and a wood fire warming the bedroom. Comfort need not be fancy. Local color consisted of the boar’s head, a pipe stuck in its mouth, that hung over the bar.