Tingle tango

Wednesday 25 November brought with it a new start for the Cairo International Film Festival which for years had been headed by the late Saadeddin Wahba who is now succeeded as festival director by actor Hussein Fahmi. And so the festival, one might suppose, has moved into more modern times: globalisation, privatisation and the Internet taking over from the leaden hand of a centralised cultural bureaucracy. Yet still, the festival staff contains an awful lot of familiar faces.

The guests at the opening ceremony -- and they were not too many this year -- marched into the Opera House merrily, confidently and elegantly. It was, indeed, rather difficult to obtain an invitation for this particular event, and the audience appeared a little more diverse than on earlier occasions. Rather than the usual host of faces familiar from television and cinema screens, the audience straddled the worlds of cinema, business and high finance, and it was amusing to put faces to names that are by now as familiar as Adel Imam's.

The jury gathered its members from across the globe: American actor, director and producer John Malkovich, head of the jury, Italian actress Franca Bettoja, Chinese director Sai Fu, Egyptian actress Athar El-Hakim, British director and producer John Hough, Polish director Slawomir Krynski, Syrian director Nabil Al-Maleh and French actress and director Brigitte Rouan.

In the absence of organisational hiccups the opening ceremony progressed smoothly, and appeared civilised and in good taste. There were two serious mistakes, however. One was the haphazard screening of scenes from films by Hassan El-Imam, Ezzeddin Zolfeqar and Soad Hosni, in tribute to the three artists. The other was the broadcasting of a long, unedited and then abruptly cut speech by Soad Hosni.

The spirit of the opening ceremony, though, was on the whole more merry than ceremonious. Farouk Hosni, who seemed to attend in his capacity as artist rather than minister of culture, concentrated on aesthetics in his speech: "Egypt is beautiful and deserves all that is beautiful."

And the dancing couple who appear in the opening film Tango were certainly beautiful as they gave a private performance to the charmed spectators at the opening ceremony. Egyptian television, unfortunately, did not broadcast the performance. Could it have been out of concern for the television public's misinterpretation of the famous dance?

Carlos Saura's Tango testifies to its director's continuing creativity and although laden with symbols almost impossible to decipher without a thorough knowledge of the Spanish heritage, the film is a beautiful and complex masterpiece.

Saura's mother was a pianist and his father a lawyer. He grew up in the Spain of General Franco, in a country bowed beneath social, political and economic oppression. He began his career in cinema making documentaries, many of which focused on the attempts of ordinary people to escape a deadening poverty by engaging in extraordinary activities, most typically bull-fighting.

Tango tells two parallel stories, merged together by the protagonist Mario Sutrez, who plays a central role in both. A director of musicals, Sutrez embarks on a film project about tango, at which he is an expert, and falls madly in love with Elena Flores, a beautiful and brilliant dancer. As with most artists, he is caught between his own artistic creativity and the demands of the producers, in this case mafia men who own all the capital.

Carlos Saura chose tango for its emotionally expressive powers both in music and step. It is not a blunt statement but the subtle and sophisticated artistic expression of an age plagued by cruelty and drenched in blood. It is a lyrical metaphor for freedom, a choreographed translation of ecstasy. It is also a model set for the newer generations as they fight their way through the hordes of moneymaking tycoons who can buy younger talents and dispose of the resistant older ones in order to produce their own version of artistic ecstasy.

The film begins at the end of one relationship as Sutrez is abandoned by a lover who finds their relationship stale. Most of the ensuing action takes place in a lush studio with mirror-covered walls, at the centre of which stands a camera on a gigantic crane. The events are seen through the lens of the camera, which captures a variety of visual levels through a multiplicity angles, as stylised and distorted as the body language involved in the dance. Saura allows a multiple layering to develop frame by frame, producing a deeply symbolic film in which each of the abundant visual details carries a portion of meaning.

Pity the critic, then, who wishes to follow as much of the festival events as possible, and who must therefore dash, out of breath, from one venue to the next before properly digesting a film as magnificent as Tango.

photo: Salah Ibrahim