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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 January 2000 Issue No. 463
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Millennium Features Profile Living Travel Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Fallen angels
By Khairiya El-BishlawiAt the last Alexandria International Film Festival (1999) many discussions on Gannet Al-Shayatin (Fallen Angels' Paradise) took place behind closed doors as members of the jury debated the film. Some saw the film as a tasteless experiment and chose to disapprove of it. The majority of members, however, agreed that regardless of different reactions to the film, it nevertheless represented a novel artistic endeavour, standing out among local productions as a worthy adventure. And this problematic film does indeed break away from established norms, taking viewers' reactions to extremes.
The so-called paradise of these fallen angels may appear to many as hellish. Its inhabitants are nihilistic to the extreme, absolutely amoral. Nonna (Amr Waked), Boussy (Salah Fahmi), Adel Rita (Sari El-Naggar), Hubba (Lebleba), Shawqiya (Safwa) and Tabl (Mahmoud Hemeida) may be seen by many among the audience as devils indeed. They choose a life liberated from all forms of order, commitment, responsibility and conformity. They are unlike any others; they are not even marginal, as some may regard them, because they are extra-marginal. They are devils of a unique type who live with an existential, purely bohemian, instinct. They practice their choices unhampered by external considerations, since they are free and against any law that may curb their instincts. It is a kind of freedom that would never be approved.
The film's shocking sarcastic exuberance towards death may produce discomfort, especially to an audience that has lived and been brought up in a socio-cultural environment which reveres, fears or else glorifies death, culminating in the belief that burial is the proper honour due to the deceased. Despite all this, the film received the Grand Prize in the International Competition in addition to Best Screenplay, both Male and Female Supporting Actors prizes and the Special Jury Award in the Panorama of Egyptian Cinema Competition.
The film postulates the idea of death from an ironic perspective, refusing to associate it with the idea of "ultimate truth". The deceased protagonist's smiles, as if commenting on the film's events, vary and take different meanings which transcend the story's ironic/comic flow. Despite the idea of death embodied in the corpse of Tabl, these devils' lives continue uninterrupted, swaying with the winds of desire, instinct and indifference. Death itself cannot break the disorder of the life they lead.
Tabl died from drinking large quantities of cheap liquor. The sole problem of his death here is the necessity of contacting his family to carry out the burial process. His lover Hubba contacts the family and so we discover, with the rest of the devils, that the deceased once belonged to a different world, one bound by rituals, traditions and values, as well as religious and social symbols. The middle class Christian family to which Tabl belonged insists on a funeral worthy of their status -- a respectable cause of death and an oak coffin. His young daughter Salwa (Caroline Khalil) oversees these ritualistic, superficial preparations, making up the corpse and fixing his broken tooth with mixed feelings of scorn and contempt.
Two worlds are brought together because of the corpse: one of social hypocrisy, moral pretense and behavioural restrictions -- represented by the conservative bourgeois family previously supported by Mounir Rasmi, the deceased's real name, a respectable government employee living in an orderly and clean house with his wife and daughter -- and another of complete disdain for any embellishment or superficial refinement.
The script, written by Mustafa Zikri and inspired by Jorge Amado's The Man Who Died Twice, is based on contrasting these two worlds' positions regarding death and its depiction of a temporary state of tangence, producing many revelatory sparks. When Hubba, Tabl's lover, goes to his family's house delivering the news of his death, the director, with one detail-conscious camera movement, comments on the beginning of the conflict between the existential chaos and the order of the bourgeois house with its picture frames and old polished furniture.
When the fallen angels insist on saying their final farewell to their deceased friend the confrontation reaches its peak. They mess with the elegant clothes and accessories the family had purchased for the deceased's burial.
The film's take on death is essentially philosophical and it treats the lives lived by people from completely diverse worlds as being separated by a gap as unfathomable as that between the living and the dead. Nothing can expose this difference more than the scene where the daughter tries to hide the hole in her father's shoe so as not to have his toe protrude from it, making him seem like a beggar, or the scene where the deceased's early photos show under the glass of the desk on which his corpse is being washed. Such scenes attest to the skill of the director (Ossama Fawzi) and the cinematographer (Tarek El-Telmessani) in condensing events and loading meanings into complex visual compositions.
In the final scene the caustic visual sense culminates in a telling end that can be read on many levels. The completely wrecked car of the devils carries Tabl's corpse, drives speedily into a dark and seemingly endless tunnel, accompanied by loud and unrestricted clamour. During this scene Hubba engages in a long monologue apologising to Tabl for her overpowering desire towards one of his friends, insisting that she can only live as a prostitute and that this new passion does not mean she is being faithless to his memory.
The film depicts a world that leaves no room for astonishment since it is governed by its own laws, or lack of, unaltered even by death. It is a vision that the director and scriptwriter broached in their first film Afarit Al-Asfalt (Asphalt Demons) whose characters are also driven by instict.
The film's production standards are exemplary. Besides cinematography, Nehad Bahgat's set design succeeded in creating the necessary atmosphere. Characterisation and casting were flawless. Especially noteworthy were Menha El-Batrawi as Tabl's wife and Menha Zeitoun as the aunt.
