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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 6 - 12 July 2000 Issue No. 489
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region Focus International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A tentative qualification
By Mustafa Darwish
That Gannet Al-Shayatin, "Fallen Angels' Paradise" should have gleaned the lion's share of awards in the sixth round of the national festival for Egyptian cinema comes as a surprise to many. The question at stake: does the film really qualify for seven awards? The best film, best filmmaker, best leading, best photography, best soundtrack and best editing awards alone can all but exhaust any festival's award-giving power; and with the exception of best lead actress (given to Sawsan Badr for Al-Abwab Al-Moghlaqa, "Closed Doors") and the best script (given to Ashraf Mohamed for Oula Thanawi, "High School"), the aforementioned six comprise by far the most significant batch of awards in the present festival. Does the film deserve it?
Let us remember that Gannet Al-Shayatin came out of the last Damascus festival (1999) triumphant, the coveted grand prix having fell square into its lap. Yet despite this and despite the fact that the film was acclaimed by a large number of critics, it proved a commercial failure and hence not a popular success. At one time during the Eid (i.e., the high season), the revenue for the film in one cinema complex plummeted to LE24 -- there could be no better proof that Gannet Al-Shayatin was not popular with the majority of cinema goers.
In any case, Gannet Al-Shayatin was made by Osama Fawzi and starred Mahmoud Hemeida (Tabl) who plays the corpse of a dead man through the film's duration. According to the credits, the film is loosely based on a novel by the renowned Brazilian writer Jorge Amado, originally called "The Man Who Died Twice." It is, truth to tell, a strange film, unfamiliar in every respect, almost the only one of its kind. Among its many mysteries is the fact that Mostafa Zikri, the script-writer, has emphasised his "betrayal" of Amado's text, announcing that he had "disfigured it" in the credits and taking pride in the alternatives that he introduced to replace certain details of the book, the most prominent of these being Tabl's fake pair of teeth -- at one point one of the devils, thinking they were gold, extracts and attempts to sell them.
Excepting Hemeida, acting icon Libliba and cameraman Tareq El-Telmesani, everyone who worked on this film is young. Seri El-Naggar, Omar Wakid, Salah Fahmi and Carolin Khalil (who received the best supporting actress award) all belong to a new generation of actors whose performance has a distinctive quality. Not only Khalid Mar'i, the film's editor, but Fwazi and Zikri too are young, their stock of experience consisting in the one orphaned feature on which they collaborated, Afarit Al-Asfalt, "Demons of the Tarmac," starring Hemeida.
Top: Gannet Al-Shayatin; above: The Clockwork Orange
Judging by that small stock, it seems that both Fawzi and Zikri long to document the life of the marginalised, which longing cannot be taken against them. It is only natural that the language of cinema, like that of literature, should be used to give an account of the marginalised, the way both arts give accounts of countless other classes of people. The marginalised, after all, exist in society -- why not depict their growing numbers, their ever more complex troubles in the light of a capitalism that is increasingly both triumphant and brutal. But the script, alas, did not tackle its topic from this angle but from another, altogether contrary one.
The life of the three devils and their two prostitute friends, all of whom bear the badge of marginalisation, passes before our eyes in such a way that it appears to be the ideal life to which we should aspire, the only life available to anyone who truly wants to be liberated of the chains of a rotten, puritan society imprisoned in its own outdated traditions and dependent on conventions that have long become irrelevant. One -- defective -- aspect of the script is that it merely revolves around meanings, not managing to communicate them in any articulate way or according to any logic whose conclusions are lucidly supported by premises.
The three devils are shocked to find out that their fellow vagrant, now dead, had actually belonged to a respectable family; and after they are informed of this secret, they carry his body to where he lived before he fled the prison of the family in search of the liberty of vagrancy under the pseudonym Tabl (the word means "drums"), with which he replaced the estimable-sounding name recorded in his birth certificate, Mounir Rasmi. His daughter, who cares only for appearances and what people say, receives the corpse and begins to put in order a funeral that can live up to the family's name and to the grandeur of death. Suddenly, without any warning, the three devils go back to the dead man's house and smuggle the corpse out, to which the daughter does not budge in response. How their return, the kidnapping of the corpse, the daughter's concession to all this came to pass remains a mystery, the script having remained silent on said points.
Thus we left the film theatre confused, understanding nothing of the motives behind the behaviour of the devils and the daughter as depicted in the script. The confounding ambiguity that besets Gannet Al-Shayatin -- no doubt a serious defect -- The Clockwork Orange is completely free of. Question: what is the connection between a film by the late Stanley Kubrick and Gannet Al-Shayatin? Answer: the coincidence of their being shown here at the same time -- Gannet Al-Shayatin in the (commercial) film theatres, The Clockwork Orange (as part of a programme drawn up by the Council's Meeting of Film Lovers, [an alternative film committee set up by the author]) in one of the halls of the Supreme Council for Culture. Both, moreover, depict the life of the marginalised; both are inspired by a novel written by an author of international acclaim, the latter being Anthony Burgess's novel of the same name.
The secret of The Clockwork Orange's success, both commercially and artistically, is the fact that its maker focused on one clear idea, the freedom of choice. The question he asks through his film: is the freedom to choose the right of every person? To which Kubrick replied with an unwavering Yes; even when it comes to a marginalised, hateful and disgusting character like Alex, the principle still applies. Alex embodies the most horrid forms an anti-social sentiment might take, yet throughout the film Kubrick adopts the opinion that the individual's right to choose freely, even if it implies hostility towards society, still takes precedence over the society's right to protect itself. Even if he is alienated and disturbed, the audience tends to sympathise with Alex, as a result of the way Kubrick depicts him. Using bright and dark lighting, for example, the filmmaker managed to give Alex the appearance of an innocent young man, more sinned against than sinning, dogged down by a merciless order of government and agencies that work to render him a harmless automaton incapable of choosing; a person who has, in short, ceased to be a person.
Thanks to the clarity and the lucid logic of its script, there is no doubt that The Clockwork Orange is an excellent example of its maker's style of convincing creativity, i.e., precisely what is lacking in Gannet Al-Shayatin, the reason it failed to communicate with the viewer. All that remains is another question: did Hemeida's part as a motionless corpse that does not utter a single word really qualify him for the best leading award? It was argued, in an attempt to justify the award, that the English actor John Herd was nominated for the American Academy best leading actor award in 1988 for a part in which his face was exposed only for a few seconds, towards the end of Elephant Man. Those who put forward this argument fail to see that Herd was not a corpse, but a live and dynamic figure who managed to express the character's predicament through movement. What is even more important is that Herd did not win the award, which was given instead to Robert Deniro for playing Jake LaMotta in Martin Scorsese's masterpiece Raging Bull.
