Strictly average movie

just watch it!

an ambitious but ultimately ineffective debut endeavor.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

The director and writer of Raja is the son of French film icon Jane Birkin. OK. The plot. Fred is loaded and lives alone in a house with two old cooks in Morocco. That is all we know about him. No friends. No family. Nothing. One day he gives a bunch of local girls a job in his garden. They all have been problem girls. Raja was a hooker because she was an orphan. Her brother is her pimp. Fred gets hot for Raja who does not get hot for Fred. Raja has a boyfriend. Raja does not speak French, which is unusual for young Moroccans. I have been. I know. And Fred speaks zero Moroccan, which is also unusual. From the state of the garden Fred has been there quite a while. That's it. Fred, by the way, does not know Raja was a hooker when he gets hot for her. This happens later. So the great day comes. His lust is satisfied and while both talk to each other in languages the other does not understand, it all goes horribly wrong. Pascal Greggory does his best to give credibility to Fred and I give him full marks for effort. But Fred is not credible. Nor is the story. I have seldom seen a film as pointless. I wonder what Jane Birkin thinks?

This film is about language. The way language operates between two people who don't understand the same language but still have the same wants, but are never able to communicate.There are people who translate for both of them, and all the translations are distorted by cultural values or translator's own intentions. I loved the performance of 'Raja', the actress is extremely beautiful. It was very intimately able to communicate the details of lives of a street child, who grew into a street-girl and ended up with a bad and loveless man who only wants to exploit her.It was not about sex, money, or other similar things, but it was how these mere ideas can ruin a love affair.In all it entertained me and broke my heart. It was such a pleasure.

After more then 20 years of continuous work French filmmaker Jacques Doillon still manages to polarize his audience. He is whirling where others rather stay quiet and the spectator either reacts with open indignation or enthusiasm (check the other comments!!!).This is also true for his movie "Raja" that is settled in Morocco. It's the story of a young woman called Raja that works in the garden of a rich Frenchman. The landowner is suffering from his solitude after leaving back a broken marriage in Paris. After spotting the girl working outside he is approaching her, for Raja a chance to escape a life in poverty. Between the two develops a strained relationship in which power, reward, love and hate is negotiated after rules that transport Doillon's astonishing analysis over topics like prostitution and post-colonialism. An incredible wise film, brilliant in acting and precise in dialog. Touching.

I was really in a mood to see a good foreign film ..having recently seen Distant and The Return and having missed Kitchen Stories and Crimson Gold thta were no longer playing at any NYC theaters. So I read a couple of reviews that were generally favorable to this film and decided to see Raja. The fact that I have been to Morocco and Marrakesh specifically also contributed to my interest in this film. While I thought the film had some merit and did give somewhat of a feeling of the plight of the Moroccan underclass I thought that, overall, it was very drawn out and seemed to prolong or unnecessarily stretch out the plot line of the somewhat bizzarre and seemingly impossible relationship between the Frenchman and Raja. I felt that the relationships between his two "servants" who cooked and cleaned and seemed devoted to him was far more believable (my sense was that they were not professional actos which really seemd to work.) His obsession with young girls, in particular Raja , and his boredom with life was clearly manifested yet it was,again in my opinion belabored and took away from the dramatic flow of the film. The ending, in particular, was also somewhat farfetched and seemed to further distract from the main theme of the film