CheerupSilver Very Cool!!!

Rijndri Load of rubbish!!

Allison Davies The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Philippa All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

fanbaz-549-872209 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?

dt1908 Two thousand kilometers from Marrakesh of Morocco to Paris France but two different worlds that will not enable communication and bridging the gap. Sad and though Fred holds some hope, the spectator can not share this hope. Seems authentic, very good performance of the actors, I agree with the person that said that some of the figures do not seem to be actors but act themselves (the house maids). Whatever seems at the beginning to be a perversion, understood later as a desperate struggle for emotional survival and reason for existence. In this sense the swimming pool is a good metaphor. I find this film to be a refined, touchy, moving, beautiful film. One of a kind.

bernice-denison I was channel surfing (the whole four on commercial TV) and Raja was on late on SBS. At first I thought I was too tied to read the subtitles and watch the film but something hooked me. Not only was Fredrick an older man but it's the cross cultural thing. Fred was smitten with Raja and he would have taken her away from her abysmal life with her pimp boyfriend Youssef and loved her unconditionally. I didn't feel the movie was too long, if anything I wanted to know more after Fred gave all his money to Youssef to pay for his marriage to Raja. The marriage you know was never going to happen. I had never heard of Pascal Greggory before and I don't know why maybe because he's French? I think he did a fantastic job in the roll of Federick - He leaves me wanting to know more about him and his acting because even without the translation he came across as a brilliant actor.

kurtz-1 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