Love lost in Shubra
Buddy, buddy, buddy, and a load of sectarian bliss: Amina Elbendary finds Film Hindi more than a little irritating
A necessary confession: I have a thing for kitsch, hence Film Hindi at the smallest hall of the Rivoli on a hot Sunday afternoon. The choice was not random. I knew what I was in for. Or at least I thought I did.
Film Hindi was rumoured to be controversial, to "talk about the Copts". For someone with a predisposition to politicise everything, even a morning cup of coffee, the rumours were a godsend. And Film Hindi, really, should have been a good movie. It could easily have surpassed what I readily admit is a low -- if elusive -- threshold: it could, and should, have been a reasonable film. Yet it falls comfortably in the category of mediocre summer-made-for-television films.
The story line is simple, though this could have been an advantage. It revolves around two friends, "Cheb" Sayed, a barber, and Atef, a satellite dish installation operative. Sayed is played by an able if aging Ahmed Adam; Atef by an obtuse Salah Abdallah. Sayed is engaged to Aida (Menna Shalabi, the only breath of fresh air on this humid afternoon) while Atef is unable to find himself a bride. Sayed is the cool guy; he dyes half of his hair blond, gigs as a rai singer at neighbourhood parties and is generally out and about. Atef is the sexually frustrated, prudish nerd.
Sayed is a Muslim and Atef is a Reformist though, he tells the object of his emotions Mary (Rasha Mahdi), he is quite willing to go Orthodox. And where else would they live but in Shubra, that locus of sectarian bliss.
The simple story is about two friends who want to get married and have difficulty finding a place to live. Independently they discover a perfect flat -- in Shubra, of course -- and then each decide to give it up for the other. Sayed favours Atef over himself, Atef favours Sayed over himself. They are friends, you see, who just happen to belong to different religious traditions. Point made.
This is, after all, a film hindi: an unnecessarily contrived scene is inserted in which Sayed is depicted with Amm Ibrahim, Mary's father, playing an old Mohamed Abdel-Wahab song on the oud. Sayed notices an old black and white photo in the living room -- a class photo showing Ibrahim as a school boy. It recalls memories of the 1919 revolution when the young Ibrahim would go out on demonstrations with his Muslim friends to protest the British occupation. A speech about national unity ensues. Inevitably, "there is no difference between a Muslim and a Christian."
That the point needs to be made so crudely and hysterically doesn't help convince even if it is a step in the right direction to acknowledge, on screen, the religious diversity of Egyptian society. Such acknowledgments surfaced throughout the 1990s in films and state-produced television series, and it is perhaps not coincidental that Film Hindi is produced by the Media Production City. If only filmmakers like scriptwriter Hani Fawzi and director Mounir Radi wouldn't hammer it in so crudely, reproducing traditional stereotypes in the process.
One of the film's early scenes is shot inside a church. Atef is confessing his sexual fantasies to the priest. That the inside of a church is depicted on screen is, of course, a political statement of sorts. But why not get it right? No one confesses at the altar, not reformists, not orthodox Copts, not anyone. Later Atef mimics Mary's mechanical prayers while trying to catch her attention. Such scenes, though not devoid of humour, really defeat their purpose. Later, after a night out with Sayed, Aida and Angel, in which some making out occurs in the car, Atef gets a jerry can full of holy water from the church to spray the car. Please!
Whenever national unity is up for discussion 1919 is invoked as the paradise lost. This particular reading of Egyptian history has been systematically promoted of late, and comes hand-in-hand with a broader revisionist reading of pre-revolutionary Egypt as a golden age of "liberalism". That it was paradisaical is a point of contention; that it might somehow be regained by such mediocre attempts as Film Hindi is beyond belief.
Sayed and Atef each make the decision to give up the flat but the women, weak spirits that they are, cannot fathom such sacrifice: they come to blows.
Feminist predispositions aside, this film is blatantly gender insensitive. The women, Aida, Mary, Aida's friend Angel, the mothers, are objects for the men's gratification. They are sub- human. They are not characters. It is a pity that Menna Shalabi, after her role in Radwan El-Kashef's Al-Sahir last summer, in which she touched a raw nerve of adolescent female frustrations, should be cast here in such a dumb role. Shalabi has the talent to be a real star if properly cast and directed.
There is so much more that could have been done with the character of Aida, a basically kind, hard-working girl, who is in love and wants to get married and is willing to wait for her fiancé to get his act together. This essential aspect of her personality makes Aida's decision at the end of the film to marry another guy from the neighbourhood because Sayed has given up the flat to Atef less than credible. By the end she is just another empty-headed girl whose only goal in life is to get married. But that's women for you.
Egyptian cinema has given the lower and middle classes a wide berth of late, concentrating instead on the marginalised or the elite. It is unfortunate, then, that when it does make an outing into the world of the lower middle classes, it should do so this insensitively.
These stereotypical parodies of the lower middle classes are so superficial as to be annoying. Going to the movies means seeing an Indian film (hence the title of the movie), ie a tragedy that contrives a happy ending. After watching an Indian film people buy kufta and tarb (and not the more expensive kebab). All Christian women wear crosses and that's how we know they're Christian. And yes, we need to know because this is about national unity, remember.
There must be a point to be made that the woman who wants to sub-let the dream apartment is also a Christian about to emigrate from Egypt. There is, too, perhaps a point being made about Aida's lingerie -- it is a kind of sartorial music box that plays tunes when touched. There are scenes in which the music goes off just as Sayed hugs Aida. Where do they sell these things? There is no attempt to even brush a coat of romantic sensibility on the scenes with the two young, and ultimately frustrated, lovers.
In the role of the struggling barber who also wants to make it as a singer Ahmed Adam adopts much of the vocabulary and mannerisms of the lower middle class. It is a role in which he is comfortable, but to which he brings zero empathy.
The film fails in adequately portraying the dreams of the urban youth, and if a good film makes the viewer identify with its characters, their struggles, predicaments and dreams, then Film Hindi fails miserably. Other than get married to relieve sexual frustrations (which only Atef, and none of the women, is thought to suffer from) these people have no dreams. Sure, Sayed dreams of becoming a famous rai singer but he doesn't do anything about it. His stroke of luck is when he runs into television anchor Tarek Allam who shoots a song of his but never airs it on television -- another unnecessary insertion, though it might vaguely imply that official culture ignores the masses. And that, frankly, is an insolent point to be made in a film that does exactly that -- ignores the masses, and then parodies them to boot. There are hardly any street scenes in the film which relies on the tried and tested sets of Media City.
Indian films are extremely popular in Egypt. They do, after all, have it all -- love, sex, drama, tears, and a happy ending. Film Hindi, ironically, has none of the above. By the end of the film Sayed and Atef are once more the buddies they always were, national unity is intact, thank you, and they have achieved none of their flimsy dreams and somewhere along the way lost the women. It is not the ending that the audience of an Indian film would expect. Yet, somehow, the filmmakers are trying to make the point that the guys come out on top nevertheless, even if its only the Muqattam hills.
