30 August - 5 September 2001
Issue No.549
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 30 August - 5 September 2001 Issue No.549 |
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Of luck and circus
Comedian Alaa Waleyeddin's third collaboration with director Sherif Arafa prompts Mustafa Darwish to review the latter's cinematic career
If one compares Sherif Arafa's work since his graduation from the Higher Institute for Cinema in 1982 with that of his contemporary graduates, it becomes immediately obvious that he has been blessed by an extraordinary amount of luck. He had the rare good fortune to direct his first full- length feature, Al-Aqzam Qadimoun (The Dwarfs Are Coming, 1987), at the age of 27, some five years after he graduated. Barely a year had passed before he made his next film, El-Daraga El-Talta (Third Grade, 1988). This time his lead actors were Ahmed Zaki and the late Soad Hosni, the latter the most stellar figure in Egyptian cinema at that time. Yet for some reason Arafa's luck let him down, and El-Daraga El-Talta failed to reap the expected benefits. Consequently, almost two years passed before he returned to the limelight; but his luck returned with a vengeance. In 1991, quite miraculously, he directed not one, not even two, but three films, the first of which, El-Le'b Ma'a El-Kobar (Playing It Big), started off his collaboration with comedy megastar Adel Imam.
Thereafter Arafa became Imam's personal director, on stage as well as on the silver screen, and for nearly seven years directed only Imam- dominated fare. This happy collaboration resulted in four films, the most important being Al-Irhab wal- Kabab (Terrorism and Kebab, 1992) and Toyour Al- Zalam (Birds of Darkness, 1995), as well as a number of plays, of which Al-Za'im (The Leader) is, alas, undoubtedly the best known. Imam's monopoly of Arafa is reminiscent of the celebrated composer-singer Mohamed Abdel-Wahab's over Mohamed Korayim, who for a long time directed only musically oriented films starring Abdel-Wahab, starting with Al-Warda Al-Baidaa (The White Rose, 1933) and ending with Rosasa fil-Qalb (A Bullet in the Heart, 1944). The collaboration, naturally enough, had a negative effect on subsequent works by Korayim who, having been in Abdel-Wahab's captivity for so long, now seemed unable to resume his career. History has a knack for repeating itself, indeed, for Arafa's seven years with Imam had the same effect on him. In that period, moreover, Arafa took to directing video clips; and, lucrative as it may have been, such work could only have exacerbated his artistic decline.
This decline is nowhere more evident than in Arafa's first post-Imam film, Edhak El-Sura Tetla' Helwa (Smile So the Picture Will Come Out Nice, 1998), a sloppy, slow affair that combines the language of theatre with that of cinema to produce a cinematic caricature with an unconvincingly simplistic story line and one- dimensional characters. Predictably, the film was a howling failure. Yet within months of its release, Arafa had found what he had been looking for all along in the person of the obese actor Alaa Waleyeddin, whom he had first encountered while casting Ya Mehalabeya Ya in 1991. In that film Waleyeddin was among a handful of up-and- coming actors selected for minor parts on the basis of the strangeness of their appearance; Arafa must have been following in the footsteps of the magician Federico Fellini. Waleyeddin played such parts in the films of Arafa and others until the failure of Edhak El-Sura Tetla' Helwa, when he starred in Arafa's Abboud Ala Al-Hudoud (Abboud on the Borders, 1999), the frivolous film that finally provided the actor with his breakthrough. Al-Nazer (The Headmaster, 2000) followed upon the success of Abboud; and Ibn Ezz (Rich Boy, 2001) completed the trilogy.
In Ibn Ezz too Arafa affects a political and social discourse that purports to address some of the problems besetting Egyptian society, the main one being businessmen who illegally obtain loans from public sector banks and then smuggle the capital abroad. Ahmed Abdalla, Arafa's favourite screenwriter since Abboud, offers the life story of Farid Ezzeddin, the spoilt son of one such businessman, who lives a life of careless abandon until his father flees, having made Ezzeddin sign documents that constitute incriminating evidence. The rich boy is arrested but soon manages to escape, thanks to a bold operation masterminded by his loyal servant (Hassan Hosni). Thereupon the film turns into an absurd string of video clip-like sketches that proceed without dramatic logic. Two scenes are sufficient to demonstrate how the logic of Ibn Ezz is identical with that of the kind of bad vaudeville that frequently passes for theatre: Ezzeddin's laughable attempt to obtain a passport so he can catch up with his father, and his disastrous participation in a wedding celebration. Here as elsewhere, in giving shape to his story, Arafa instructs the actors to yell as loud as they can; he relies almost entirely on theatrical gestures and verbal flourish.
Scenes like the one depicting Ezzeddin's difficult birth, for example, act to undermine the credibility of the film. As the father speeds on his way to the hospital (the mother is to die in childbirth), he has a minor accident, and the driver of the other car turns out to be the family doctor on his way to the house; by the time the accident occurs, the mother has died; yet the father still gets out of the car and demands compensation for his shattered headlight. This makes for a laboured and tasteless attempt at making people laugh -- all that the Waleyeddin- Arafa collaboration seems to be about this time. Obscenity and abortively erratic imagination abound -- to excess -- yet the last stroke most definitely is the scene in which Ezzeddin escapes, when the servant has to abandon the task of driving the car to Ezzeddin's equally loyal poodle. No sooner does Ezzeddin escape than the film loses all semblance of integrity; after that Waleyeddin's increasingly impatient audience could no longer keep giving Arafa the benefit of the doubt.
In a recent statement, the fat star whose appearance on the horizon is wholly of Arafa's making declared, "If I relied on my size, or [Mohamed] Heniedi on his looks, then we would be better off performing in the circus." Now there is no reason an artist should not perform in the circus. After all there is nothing shameful about doing so. What an artist should be ashamed of, rather, is turning the cinema into a circus show.
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