Another goose in the basket

By Khairiya El-Beshlawi

Any demand for an elevated cinematic language from Abu Khatwa seems in itself superficial and silly when we are confronted with the general ugliness that currently prevails in the cinema. Yet this naive tale played by handicapped characters in a preposterous social environment is aimed, and non too successfully, at nothing more elevated than knee-slapping entertainment

Abu Khatwa, the hero, (El-Shahhat Mabrouk) is a physical education teacher at a local village school in the province of Tanash. He is in love with the mayor's daughter, Neama (Hanan Shawqi) and wishes to marry her but his rival, a land-owning village idiot, is favoured by her father. But when he finds his name in the newspaper as the winner of the Ramadan Fawazir -- the prize is LE150,000 -- he suddenly gains the mayor's approval.

Abu Khatwa arrives in Cairo, carrying a goose in a basket, to receive his prize. He discovers, though, that the prize is not in cash but a flat. Salama Abdel-Salam (Hussein El-Sherbini), the housing company representative, offers him LE100,000 in return for the flat but tempts him to invest the sum in a financial investment company. It is not long, though, before Abu Khatwa realises he has been conned.

Helped by Haswa (Diaa El-Marghani), the owner of the modest hotel where he resides -- an ex-criminal who retains links with a gang of graveyard dwelling outlaws -- he sets about to regain the money he had won.

The film revolves around an image of "villagers" that encompasses the educated but naive, embodied by Abu Khatwa, and the illiterate and idiotic, but little else. Abu Shewal (Magdi Fekri) is the village idiot who, with Abu Khatwa, is supposed to represent traditional values. Cliché follows cliché, as the basically decent village folk face tribulations in the city.

Sub-plots proliferate. There is the requisite romantic interest, and a separately developing melodrama played out against the main tale. nothing, though, manages to be integrated and the addition of such predictable leftovers does nothing to enhance the flavour of what is, in fact, a pretty tasteless dish.

The list of clichés is endless: the heavily made-up village girl; the villager who embodies goodness, chivalry and honour even when taken advantage of; the classification of thieves into five-star hotel habitués, with whom we shouldn't sympathise, and petty outlaws who have hearts of gold. Belly-dancers, popular singers and second-rate comedians crowd the screen, further clogging the view.

El-Shahhat Mabrouk is an actor whose career is based on body-building. All he is required to do is to flex his muscles in defending whatever good cause happens to be the subject of the film. Diaa El-Marghani, his side-kick, is also responsible for the screenplay.

Abu Khatwa is a near perfect example of what happens when a film decides to dispense, more or less, with a screenplay. It is an insult to those who treat cinema as a respectable popular art and an insult, too, to the commodified films that established the formulas on which it so heavily relies. There is no rule, after all, engraved in tablets of stone, that says that commercial cinema must be vapid, must always lack art, must aspire not to the lowest common denominator but to something even worse, something that the filmmakers themselves impose on their patronised audience.

Unfortunately Abu Khatwa is not an exception. Indeed, there is a long list of ancestors, of other Abus --Abu Rabi', Abu Seri', Abu Zeid Zamanoh, Abu Kartona -- several of which, coincidentally, boasted screenplays written by actors. Without fail they have relied on stock plots and cardboard stereotypes, on ready-made components that are not only tired, but are incompetently assembled. Add a generous helping of sex, coffee-house banter and innuendo and hey-presto, one more Abu, a species whose survival appears to disprove any law of natural selection.