Feigning the fantastic

By Hani Mustafa

Abdel-Latif Abdel-Hamid's Nassim Al-Rouh (Breeze of the Soul)

The director's first two films interspersed a realist idiom with moments of lyricism, and the resulting collages were well-received by critics. With his third film, however, Abdel-Hamid began a more systematic exploration of the fabulous, confounding those who had thought he would follow the formula he had already set.

"The spectator who arrived to see my third film," the director says, "expecting it to be like the first two had something of a shock. And instead of judging the third film as an independent entity it was invariably discussed in comparison with the first two, despite there being few, if any, valid grounds for making such a direct comparison."

Abdel-Hamid's fourth film, Nassim Al-Rouh (Breeze of the Soul), screened at this year's festival, represents a return to the director's earlier formula.

The story is undeniably melodramatic -- a passionate extra-marital affair, love, jealousy and murder. But why return to territory, or at least techniques, already explored in his first two films?

"It is the subject," insists Abdel-Hamid, "that determines the manner in which it will be presented. I have never felt the necessity to restrict myself to any particular formula. The fact that both of my first films were successful, and met with the approval of the public, did not make me feel obliged to continue repeating myself ad nauseam. The dramatic structure, the directorial form, of any film comes suddenly, as a kind of possession, and dictates the shape of the final product.

"In many ways Se'oud Al-Mattar predates my first two films since my graduation project for the Higher Institute of Cinema in Moscow, from which I graduated in 1981, is in many ways a prototype of my third film."

So did the third film, which dealt with the life of a scenarist particularly lend itself to the incorporation of fabulous strands?

"Certainly the main protagonist is a script-writer, and because of this I had the opportunity to play with the complex process of creation, and with the many imaginative levels that involves. In dealing with more quotidian realities one is, of course, bound by the laws governing that reality."

In its essence, cinema is pure fantasy, a truth that Abdel-Halim's films bring home to the spectator. This is particularly clear in Nassim Al-Rouh. The film begins on a fabulous enough note. The titles come up to the accompaniment of the sound of phones ringing. The first frame is of a girl's bare feet on desert sand. Beside her is a phone receiver which is not connected to anything. She picks up the receiver to speak with her lover and describes her husband's entry on the scene, wielding a gun, with the intention of shooting her. Soon we realise that this is a nightmare -- the lover's. By the end of the film we see the nightmare becoming a reality, down to the minutest of details, except this time it is the dreamer who is the victim.

Every single film of Abdel-Hamid's contains, to some degree or other, such fantastical elements. At times they are embedded thoroughly in the dramatic context in which they appear, are hidden; at others, they are more explicit, more freely employed, as in Se'oud Al-Mattar.

"Any work," Abdel-Hamid says, "derives its components from reality. Any work must derive some component or other from the personality of its creator. Whether derived from reality or from the writer's personality, the writer must make use of it in the dramatic texture of the work. A scenario doesn't suddenly and at one go materialise in your mind. Rather, it is like a tree: it comes into being, develops, and grows branches."