A kitsch but lively modern Cairo social panorama"They" say it's overly faithful to the bestselling novel by Alaa Al Aswany which I have not read. For Egypt,
Yacoubian Building is the most expensive film ever (quotes vary). Director Hamid was 28 when he made it and is the son of the screenwriter who did the adaptation. The film is an ambitious and promising if under-edited piece. Perhaps it ought to have been in parts like Marco Tullio Giordana's
The Best of Youth/La meglio gioventù, to which it has been compared. But instead it's a somewhat sprawling 172 minutes and feels at times like a smashed-together telenovela.
Hollywood Reporter says the film may "offer a revealing window into the secular world of a modern Islamic country -- its indulgence in alcohol, sexual promiscuity, political corruption and personal betrayals. From such 'deformities', the movie argues, Islamic fundamentalism gains its most passionate adherents." But we can do a little better than this crude analysis. Moroccan-born western-educated novelist
Laila Lalami points out the book (and consequently the movie) is full of prejudices against gays; resembles the old "large-scale melodramas" produced by Egypt's "huge film industry," with their "young idealists, desirable ingénues, old predators, and so on"; and is crudely moralistic -- with almost every character forced to make choices that "ultimately result in either their downfall or redemption." It's also full of heavy-handed emotional manipulation and cliff-hangers. Alaa Al Aswany is no Naguib Mahfouz. Aside from the prejudice against gays, we're told that mixed marriages produce confused children; that all women love sex enormously; etc. It's important to realize that however engaging the film is and notable the actors are in the Egyptian film world, it's made out of dross, not gold.
The titular Armenian-owned, Twenties Yacoubian Building in the once elegant, restricted central zone of the city "became home to Cairo's rich and powerful when it opened," Lalami writes. After the revolution, however, "storage sheds on the rooftop were rented out to poor families--a sort of sky-high slum." This allows for a story about the building's residents that spans society. The action is set in the 1990's. And the basic panorama goes something like this:
In the foreground is Zaki Bey El Dessouki, or "Zaki Pasha" (weathered charmer Adel Imam), a superannuated playboy kicked out of the family apartment by his mean, half-crazy sister. He may seem seedy, but he's the house aristocrat. Fanous (Ahmed Rateb) is his faithful manservant. Dawlat (Essad Younis) is his nutty, vindictive sister, who has always resented his fun loving ways and now is out to get him. Hatem Rasheed (Khaled El Sawy) is a gay editor who takes Abd Raboh (Bassem Samra), a good-looking soldier from the country, as his lover. Rasheed isn't mincing, but he reflects an Egyptian discomfort with gayness; still, an attempt is made to understand him. He likes dark Nubian men because they remind him of an early experience with a family servant. The film's treatment of the sexual aspect of Hatem's relationship with the soldier feels like something made in the 1950's. In general sex is a burden for the people in this movie, either a risky temptation or an ordeal. It gets nasty, and then the camera shrinks away.
Haj Assam (Nour El Sheriff) is a self-made millionaire (through a chain of stores selling modestly-priced women's clothing) with political ambitious. He wants to get into politics -- to be elected to the People's Assembly (Majlis al Sha'ab) for access to power, but he is made to pay dearly for it. Along the way, he takes a penniless young widow with a young son, Soad (Somaya el Khashab), as a second wife and forces her to have an abortion. As Lalani puts it, Assam "is the
nouveau riche to Zaki' Bey's aristocrat." The brothers Abaskharon and Malaak (Ahmed Bedire) are Coptic Christians who save every penny they make, by legal and illegal means, in order to finally afford a room on the roof.
On the roof are Taha (newcomer Mohamed Imam) the son of a
bawab. A bawab is a doorkeeper, more like a concierge or a super in New York rather than a "janitor" as it's translated. With such a lowly father, Taha is turned down by the police academy as not socially adequate to become an officer, and adopts a "plan B," to major in political science, which leads him to sympathy with the university religious fanatics, who like him come from poor families, and he eventually becomes an Islamic fundamentalist. His girlfriend Buthayna (the lovely Hind Sabry) leaves him when he becomes religious. She's previously been sexually harassed in every job she's had -- as we're shown in a lurid scene. Perhaps she feels too defiled to be worthy of one so innocent and decent as Taha, and she seems hardened. A reader has pointed out that she is much poorer in the book than here. "Egypt's young men are easy preys to religious extremism," Laila Lalani says, "while the country's young women are victims of sexual exploitation." Eventually Buthayna goes to work for Zaki, who's reformed after being robbed by a whore and kicked out by his sister and treats her well. Their May-December romance is the film's only niceness -- except for the relationship between Zaki and Christine (singer Youssra), who runs and sings in the most elegant restaurant in town, where the songs of Edith Piaf are revived. (One of the film's most magical sequences is a long pan through downtown Cairo with the voice of Piaf herself in the background.) Taha is imprisoned and given Abu Ghraib treatment to de-islamicize him. It doesn't work. To get revenge, he trains as a terrorist -- a chain of events that looks frighteningly up-to-date.
The film has little details any Cairo downtown resident will know -- like Zaki Pasha yelling angrily because another resident has left the door of the antique elevator open on their floor so no one else can use it. Though this isn't Naguib Mahfouz, like him it attempts to draw a richly representative picture of a whole society. It's a rather sad picture with its disapproval of the present and nostalgia for the past. And again, despite the three, or perhaps six, million dollars spent, some exterior sound is awful, the wrong kind of lens is used to pan up and down the city buildings, and some of the Islamicists' beards look pasted on. But with all that's going on, it holds your attention.
Shown as part of the San Francisco International Film Festival 2007. Earlier in the year one of the Film Comments Selects series at Lincoln Center, New York.
SHOWTIMES
Sun, May 6 / 02:00 / Kabuki / YACO06K
Wed, May 9 / 01:30 / Kabuki / YACO09K
Thu, May 10 / 07:00 / Kabuki / YACO10
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