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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 June 2000 Issue No. 486 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 15 - 21 June 2000 Issue No. 486
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters The banality of lust
By Khairiya El-Bishlawi
How to explain the unexpectedly wild popularity of Gonoun Al-Haya (Crazy Life), filmmaker Said Marzouq's latest release? On seeing the film, there is nothing to it, it seems, apart from the glibly sensational. Other than a single, minor scene that alludes to the corruption that has undermined the housing industry, everything in the film serves to describe, illuminate, facilitate and expand on an interminable series of love affairs. There are, to count them, the relationship between the high-profile engineers Sanaa and Wasim (Ilham Shahin and Mahmoud Qabil), the relationship between a young man Magdi (Karim Abdel Aziz) and the wife of the owner of the garden in which he works (a middle-aged fallaha), the relationship between Magdi and Sanaa, after he starts working as a chauffeur for her, the relationship between Magdi and Sanaa's niece (Yasmin Abdel-Aziz), which ends tragically, and the relationship between Wasim and the lover with whom he moves in after Sanaa discovers he is having an extra-marital affair. Lust, lust and yet more lust -- though the mindless depiction of sex is couched in an aesthetically pleasing and often stimulating visual framework, there is nothing in the script, it seems, to endow these dramatically unjustified connections with any human depth.
The dramatic approach is, in fact, wholly focused on the animal instincts and the rapt, primitive sensuality of the characters. The action opens with Wasim having a lustful conversation with his lover, and in the background Sanaa listening through her mobile phone. From that point on the film presents the repercussions of the breakup, revealing little more than the lust for flesh and blood. Magdi represents the archetypal desirable young man embroiled in a labyrinth of love, money and revenge; the power games he undertakes and his sincere love for the niece, as may well be expected, end both tragically and violently. Taken on its own terms, this is the cinematic device that communicates the point of the film, or rather the only sense one can make of it. As a work of art, it is evidently the embodiment of the craziness of life (a more literal translation of the Arabic title), Marzouq's overriding metaphor for the eternal relationship between man and woman which, according to him, is the source of all disturbance, discord and imbalance. It is a strain that runs through this filmmaker's entire opus, beginning with Zawgati wal Kalb (My Wife and the Dog, 1971), despite the diversity of the approaches he has adopted since.
The film has cultural reference, for sure. Visually much of the action occurs in the Western-style villas of the newly rich, the polished, luxurious interiors of Cairo's latter-day lords. It is this, there is reason to believe, that draws a growing everyday audience to the movie theatres to watch, satisfying the curiosity of the simple and the dispossessed while at the same time whetting their appetite for glamour. Yet such visual awareness of cultural life and class distinctions is rendered detrimental to the film's overall design by the cinematic clichés that permeate its scenes, stock characters and turns of phrase that are not only worn out in themselves but strike an irritating chord in that they betray an ignorance of current social realities. The stereotypical Nubian servant -- a long standing element of comic relief in Egyptian performance traditions -- and the lustful fallaha, her arms covered in gold bracelets, the wad of money with which she seduces Magdi bulging out of the pocket of her galabiya, are no longer interesting or relevant. In the latter case the shallowness of the character even reduces the viewer's pleasure in the visual beauty of the garden, rendering the scenes of other-worldly love ultimately unconvincing. That Sanaa's niece and Magdi should have attended the same primary school (this is the script's superficial way of justifying their romantic connection) is another instance of the film's failure to convince. What, one cannot help asking, is the ultimate -- cultural, social, political or intellectual -- significance of these characters?
Despite the lack of content -- melodrama's inseparable partner -- the film achieves a narrative and visual harmony whose value cannot be understated. The crime-mystery aspect of the approach is largely successful, in that it turns intellectually void and morally repulsive material into compelling viewing. Magdi becomes the focus of a whole series of conjectures concerning those who bear him a grudge following his final attachment to the young and beautiful niece. Concepts of sin, of moral outrage, of erotic entrapment and betrayal are played out with a sustained and consistently gripping precision, and the dialogue is by turns sophisticated and provocative. Combined with the clichés with which the film abounds, though, the fixation on sex and violence can only really be seen as a cheap selling mechanism, at least in so far as it is not dramatically backed up. But what is absent in coherence, Marzouq makes up for with technical prowess -- that much is due. And the character of Magdi is both consistently interesting and highly developed in some ways. But on seeing the film, one cannot help noting that there is little to it apart from the camera work and the narrative thrust. And the pervasive lack of meaning, along with the subversion it engenders, in effect, managed to spoil everything else.
