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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 March 2000 Issue No. 474 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 23 - 29 March 2000 Issue No. 474
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Lost in Yehya's labyrinth
By Khairiya El-Bishlawi
Dawoud Abdel-Sayed's Ard Al-Khawf (Land of Fear) is a film that requires more than one viewing, invites various interpretations and challenges any single, clear-cut set of meanings that might be derived from its symbolism. Elusive, ambiguous, laden -- it is a work that can only be deciphered through following the journey of its protagonist, Yehya El-Manqabawi, into an underworld of crime and drug dealing that eventually takes over his life, until he becomes one of its most prominent members. The film is, in this sense, a genuinely original work whose content, though objective, manages to express the issues that preoccupy its author. And even if its style is reminiscent of Martin Scorcese (Scarface, Casino etc.), it still offers an example of Abdel-Sayed's quintessential protagonist -- the suffering, helpless individual who comes up against some pervasive, indestructible, inexplicable and often ambiguous power (Al-Sa'alik, Ard Al-Ahlam, Al-Bahth 'an Sayed Marzouq etc.).
Ard Al-Khawf intermingles private and public concerns, to the extent that it becomes hard to distinguish the social from the personal. In the same way, the character of the clean police officer is confused with that of the drug dealer and murderer. But, the paradoxical dimension notwithstanding, interior monologue and exterior dialogue remain distinctly separate. Where the former expresses the tragedy of torn identity and painful duality (a labyrinthine route towards the unknown), the latter displays an impressive capacity for assimilation into the world of crime and for establishing a position of supremacy among the drug lords of Batniya, Hamzawi and Gamaliya.
The film opens in a snooker club in Cairo in 1968, with two police officers whose relationship revolves around some shady affair that involves them both. The first of these is Yehya El-Manqabawi (Ahmed Zaki), an officer known for his courage and integrity; the second is Omar El-Assyouti (Ezzat Abu-Ouf) who is ostentatious, jealous and visibly vindictive. Surprisingly, the first has ostensibly been dismissed from service while the second has been promoted.
It is a time of resentment, disillusion and defeat (soon after the June 1967 War). Yehya has been secretly planted into the drug world in order to report on its illicit activities, cut off from his previous life and subject to trial, with only one document declaring his activities to be "in the service of the nation" though it does not entitle him to any form of legal or other protection. He can use the paper only in case of being sentenced to death.
Yehya (Ahmed Zaki) & Mo'alim Hodhod (Hamdi Ghieth) in Ard Al-Khawf
This is a top-secret mission that only the head of the secret intelligence agency and the ministers of justice and interior know about. It is code-named Ard Al-Khawf, and Yehya is given the incidentally biblical alias, Adam. The scene in which he is assigned the mission, set in the house of some high-ranking official, is precisely executed to convey the impression of Adam biting the apple and exiting paradise forever. Henceforward he can no longer enjoy the privileges of being an officer or any kind of respectable official, but the alternative advantages of belonging in the underworld, which will be his to the end, are a comparable recompense. At the threshold of this new, villainous world, he must acquire the permanent mark of corruption. As he becomes a new person, Yehya addresses himself: "You will really be corrupt, but in the deepest place in your mind you must remain a police officer." The spiritual undertones are palpable. Yehya is at last entering the mortal world and adopting the human condition in all its cruelty. He is inheriting the earth.
Abdel-Sayed employs oliloquies which abound in tragedy in order to reveal the psychological depth of his protagonists, something further enhanced by a complex structure of music and imagery.
Ard Al-Khawf is undoubtedly the closest Abdel-Sayed has come to addressing the ordinary viewer. It is a film in which he has endeavoured to incorporate entertaining elements in such a way that they become part and parcel of his narrative. The story-telling and the social and metaphysical dimensions of his work are effectively integrated. Yehya's first step, for example, is to go to a night club where the vulgarity of popular music, the ugliness of the belly dancer and the coarseness of the drunks all combine to create an impression of the Fall. Yehya meets Rabab (Safwa), the rich proprietoress of the nightclub who deals drugs to her clientele and whose knowledge of the underworld provides him with a smooth introduction. Eager to protect herself against conviction, she pounces on the opportunity to be closely tied with a policeman (at the nightclub Yehya is known as Abu-Daboura, a debauched reference to his former status). They marry not for love but because they are useful to each other, and the nightclub becomes the base from which Yehya extends his sphere of influence and makes contacts, many of whom are regular clients of Rabab's. Eventually, after proving himself both physically and tactically, he is accepted as a drug-dealing lord of the underworld.
Ard Al-Khawf's approach to post-revolutionary night life is identical with that of popular commercial cinema. Rabab's gay assistant (a necessary component of belly-dancing settings) is in fact virtually the same character as that of Fawakih's servant in the classic, Zanqit Al-Sitat. Here, as elsewhere, Abdel-Sayed's originality lies, rather, in his ability to utilise such techniques intellectually, assimilating them into the fabric of this highly complex work. With the action taking place during the period from 1968 to 1981 (these are Abdel-Sayed's specifically chosen dates), the viewer senses the social climate of post-1967 Egypt even though he is hardly ever presented with normal, everyday characters or events. And the film's predominant theme -- that of social and individual, artistic as well as metaphysical and spiritual choice -- is tackled from a range of aesthetic and intellectual perspectives. But this does not prevent the film from raising questions about means and ends, and interrogating the state of existence itself, evoking the dark and limitless labyrinths of any one life course.
Yehya finally meets Mo'alim Hodhod (Hamdi Ghieth), a hash lord who in many ways resembles the character of the Godfather, with his veteran's calmness and warped logic, his premeditated cruelty and solid determination, and the vast army of dealers and criminals that he commands. His character is perhaps best evoked in the final scene when, along with Yehya and other paragons of the underworld, he meets the new, post-Sadat heroin dealers who have recently invaded Heliopolis with their army of black Mercedes cars. Hodhod's calculated fury is frightening, but its object is nonetheless a final, perhaps inevitably unresolved settling of scores. The choice of Heliopolis -- originally the residence of a refined gentry -- is no more arbitrary than the choice of characters' names which, though in a complex and ultimately confounding way, draw on the Bible and the Quran in an effort to provide the film with a sustained system of religious and metaphysical references, retracing the paths of the prophets not only in the individual characters' stories but also in the story of Egypt during that period.
Yet the film still has its moments of poignancy and pathos, exemplified in Yehya's fleeting relationships with women who exist outside the underworld, in the emotional significance of the interior monologues and in the beauty and power of Abdel-Sayed's grand orchestration of imagery and sound -- an orchestration whose intellectual significance, even if the viewer does not comprehend it at first, communicates a strong and sustained emotional charge. One feels for the characters, sensing -- if not "getting" -- their cultural and intellectual significance, crushed by the magnitude of their profoundly multi-layered presence.
