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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 August 2000 Issue No. 494 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 10 - 16 August 2000 Issue No. 494
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Books Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons In search of the moral
By Mustafa Darwish
When I left Cairo a month ago, heading for Germany, then England and Scotland, only three Egyptian films were being shown in the cinemas: Belya we Demagho Al-Alya, Shagi' Al-Sima and Gonoun Al-Haya. What surprised me most about the first, and also the most successful, by veteran filmmaker Nader Galal, was a billboard ad which featured the film's star, Mohamed Heneidi, as a baby, replete with bib and bottle. The most surprising thing about young director Ali Ragab's Shagi' El-Sima was the fact that many scenes were lifted almost directly from John Badham's The Hard Way (1999) with Ahmed Adam and Yasser Galal standing in for Michael J Fox and James Woods. I had not realised that video recordings of American features arrived in the local markets as quickly as to make such nearly instantaneous plagiarism possible.
Unlike the other two Gonoun Al-Haya (by Said Marzouq, director of the 1977 classic Oridu Hallan) was promoted as a serious film. But because its supposed moral depravity has caused a stir, actress Ilham Shahin took it upon herself to give interviews in its defence, notably to the London-based daily Al-Hayat. Should a husband cheat on his wife, Shahin declared, the wife has every right to cheat back on the husband; the film simply sounds a warning note and calls for a return to our blessed traditions (the latter claim, it should be noted, logically contradicts the former).
Based on a novel by Ismail Walieddin, the film opens with architect Sanaa (Shahin) discovering that her husband, Wasim (Mahmoud Qabil) is seeing a less beautiful woman. Determined to play tit for tat, she earmarks the young chauffeur Magdi (Karim Abdel-Aziz) who, though she does not know it at the time, is already having an affair with the owner of a nursery. Things become even more complicated when Magdi meets Sanaa's niece (Yasmin Abdel-Aziz). They discover they were childhood friends, fall in love and determine to get married. But the jealousy of Magdi's materialistic, working-class lover tragically gets in the way. By now it should be apparent that the film's subject matter makes no pretense to having anything to do with Egyptian traditions anyway, and consequently can serve no warning note with respect to them. Strangely, as far as this film is concerned, in the face of overwhelmingly negative reviews the production company reacted to its failure to win a prize in the last Alexandria Festival by refusing to participate in next month's round of the festival.
On the way to Fingal's Cave (immortalised 170 years ago by Mendelssohn), news of the jury ruling in Miami that five tobacco companies must pay $145 billion in compensation for health complications caused by smoking (and subsequently, upon my return via Germany, news of Erin Brokovich's triumphant research, which had finally won the inhabitants of the small California town of Hinkley $333 million in compensation for health complications caused by infected water) acted in a roundabout way to intensify my concerns about the future of Egyptian film. While Shahin's (forced and unconvincing) point that Gonoun Al-Haya responds to a social issue continued to be lost on me, both these of the genuinely important social issues that reached their respective conclusions whilst I was away on holiday had already been transformed into excellent movies which may well have contributed to the court rulings -- namely Michael Mann's The Insider and Steven Soderbergh's Erin Brokovich, both of which have been screened in Cairo.
The first opens in 1995, when a chemist and high-ranking employee of Brown & Williamson, Jeffrey Wigand (Russel Crowe) is dismissed from his job for objecting to the addition of a harmful ingredient to cigarette tobacco, and through the aid of CBS's Lowel Bergman (Al Pacino) -- whose programme, "Sixty Minutes," sets out to uncover just such scandals -- becomes one of America's most talked about whistle-blowers. Working closely with the filmmaker, script-writer Eric Roth made use of a Vanity Fair article -- "The Man Who Knew Too Much" by Mary Brenner -- depicting the ups and downs, the pains and pleasures of Wigand's fight for the truth, when his word was pitted against that of the chairmen of several major tobacco companies. Isolated defamed, threatened, vilified, he nonetheless emerged victorious. Similarly, Julia Roberts' impressive performance as Erin Brokovich, whose battle against the Pacific gas and electricity company is similar in its David versus Goliath plotting, begins with a chance discovery -- that the giant company has been dumping chromium into drinking water, causing the inhabitants of Hinkley to contract cancer and in some cases more horrifying diseases.
Both films sound warning notes -- serious, convincing ones -- and both, quite clearly, have old fashioned moral agendas at their heart, which is not quite the case with Gonoun Al-Haya.
