The thing about preparing for Morocco is that one inevitably turns to the wrong material. Bogart, for instance. I watch “Casablanca” the week before departure, my fourth viewing if memory serves (and memory, at 40-something, serves with increasing selectivity). Then “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” because why stop at one vintage delusion?

These films have precisely nothing to do with Morocco – or everything to do with it –depending on your tolerance for Hollywood’s blithely imagined geography.

What they don’t show you in the movies is Charles de Gaulle airport, that fluorescent purgatory where the gate on my e-ticket turns out to be fiction, requiring me to backtrack via train to another terminal, through security again (because once is never enough), only to discover 25 Brazilian tourists

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