Phantasmagoria in jail
Youssef Rakha finds the second El-Limby poorer than the first
Elli Bali Balak (You Know Who), the second movie to star Mohamed Saad as the cult figure El- Limby, is a Sami El-Adl production directed by Wael Hassan and written jointly by Sameh Serrelkhetam and Nader Salaheddin. Aside from Abla Kamel and Hassan Hosni -- the indispensable supporting roles of El-Limby -- it features a previously unknown actress, Nevine Mandour. Its complex score by Khaled Hammad incorporates Esam Karika songs. And it retains all those qualities that made El-Limby paradoxically popular: the retarded demeanour and speech impediment of the main character, the ludicrous violence in which he is constantly engaging, his working-class urban surroundings (including the signature farah sha'bi or popular wedding), the happily ending love story...
What Elli Bali Balak lacks is the first film's greatest virtue -- irony. Many have marvelled at the success of El-Limby, attributing it, probably correctly, to plummeting artistic tastes on the part of the general viewer. How could such a distressing embodiment of stupidity, vulgarity and amorality become the emblem of an age? Yet therein, precisely, resides El-Limby's staying power. On the surface it is the story of the late liver-sandwich stall owner's illiterate son, his fiancee (Hala Shiha), his mother, an incredibly powerful woman who rents bicycles (Abla Kamel) and their violinist neighbour (Hassan Hosni). Poverty, love, corruption: these are the film's principal themes; and it is through their orchestration that the most prevalent cinematic vision of contemporary society is prodded and parodied. El-Limby as the marginalised anti-hero is not, as one might expect in the dramatic framework put forth in the script, an exemplar of good. Rather he is a dissipated imbecile, a mama's boy, a scheming strongman. Nor does Farawla, his mother, offer a very moving vision of the aging working-class woman. She too is a manipulative drama queen, selfish and impossibly cruel to the children who hire her bicycles. Rather than drawing on moral sentiments to invite sympathy, the characters trigger a peculiar sense of recognition; and instead of implying a disturbing verisimilitude, the events they go through are sustained through light- hearted humour. At some level people sympathised with El-Limby because they saw in him a profoundly true, if ultimately innocuous, reflection of themselves -- the petty helplessness, the complete absence of intellect, the money- centred desperation -- but, equally, the possibility, even probability, however fantastical, that all such obstacles in the way of consumerist stability (the final goal, one surmises) will be overcome. The last scene in the film features Saad, veteran of the adult literacy exam and unaccountably respectable father, teaching his children the Latin alphabet, with Shiha looking overjoyed in the background.
The most striking point the first film relates to language: El-Limby's chronic failure to speak clearly, let alone meaningfully. The point is illustrated in the scene during which Saad accompanies Shiha (chaperoned by her little sister) to an outdoor cafe overlooking the Nile. Having managed to get rid of the little girl, the couple sit silently before each other. Shiha wants Saad to say something, anything; and typically of the character, whose speech impediment reflects a dire intellectual emptiness, he repeatedly tries and fails; she is about to leave when it becomes apparent that he is sitting back to back with another young man in the company of his own partner, and as Saad overhears what the man says to her he begins to repeat it to Shiha. When the man announces that he has written a poem for his beloved, Saad makes the same announcement. But the man claims that he has left the piece of paper on which he wrote the poem at home, leaving Saad at a complete loss -- forced to improvise a poem as he sits there. The monosyllabic drivel that ensues pleases not only Shiha but the man, who is heard repeating it at the end of the scene. And it is as if the film is proclaiming the death of language -- a condition of the process of subverting the characters' social and moral reality.
From the opening scenes of Elli Bali Balak and, to a lesser extent, through the duration of the film, this sense of the death of language is apparent in El-Limby's instantly recognisable mode of stuttering. Yet, although the trademark knife and explosive temperament are retained -- the film opens with El-Limby accompanying a friend to the house of the latter's wife to be, where he is arrested, for the 25th time, for stealing money (his rightful inheritance, he claims) from his uncle -- before too long it becomes apparent that the Limby of Elli Bali Balak is less a parody of the marginalised anti- hero than Saad's own attempt at imbuing his by now phenomenally popular alterego with some degree of significance; unlike his counterpart in the first film, this Limby ends up being a moral agent; and unlike his counterpart's, his struggle involves a search for meaning. Equally Elli Bali Balak is Saad's attempt at demonstrating his ability as an actor. He plays two diametrically opposed roles -- Saad is also the meticulously strict, pathologically angry warden of the prison in which El-Limby serves time -- and in both of them he is constantly striving to outdo himself. To a far greater extent than El-Limby, sadly, Elli Bali Balak is a Mohamed Saad vehicle -- unwittingly more concerned with establishing Saad's talent than sustaining El- Limby's cult status.
For a film that attempts to impart a message -- added to El-Limby's original themes of poverty and social corruption is the theme of identity, which this message would seem to be about -- the story line is too flimsy for comfort, its fantastical elements too in-your-face for the viewer to adequately maintain suspension of disbelief. No sooner do you see El-Limby posing for his mug shots as if he were a fashion model, then serving up his familiar brand of dyslexic eloquence to a television presenter doing a programme about prison inmates, then engaging nonchalantly in prison life -- this prison is a fantastically spick-and-span place, without the vaguest sign of distress or drudgery -- than the prison warden, Riyad El- Manfalouti (a man who just happens to be El- Limby's perfect look-alike) is introduced. The last in a line of serious and devoted officers, El- Manfalouti is severe, highly strung, perfectly lucid -- if equally ridiculous in his way. He viciously punishes El-Limby, whose omnipotent nonchalance is challenged for the first time. El- Manfalouti's upper lip is so stiff, literally, that he has consulted numerous physicians -- and he is seen during one of these consultations with the prison doctor, whom he gruffly dismisses as if he were an inmate. The next half hour is devoted to El-Limby's stay in prison -- familiar territory, this -- and an introduction to El-Manfalouti's family life: his wife (Mandour) and his little daughter. Of the latter the viewer is given to understand two facts: that El-Manfalouti has alienated his wife and daughter, who lead a miserably repressed (if prosperous) existence, and that there occurs, during the few days El-Limby has spent in prison, a dispute over the daughter joining the dance group at her school leaves El-Manfalouti seriously upset with his wife.
In the mean time: El-Limby wants to get out; he will go about his escape as soon as he has the chance, with characteristic carelessness, irrespective of the consequences. Prior to the escape scenario, only one scene is worth mentioning. As part of his punishment for lack of discipline, El-Limby is assigned the washing of all the inmates' uniforms by hand, among other things. He sits in the middle of an immense chamber, a large basin between his legs -- just like a traditional washerwoman -- while two lines of inmates, the one in uniform, the other in underwear, come and go in opposite directions, converging at the pile of dirty uniforms to his side. El- Limby looks delighted as he goes about his task. Such images of frivolity constitute the bulk of the film's content, which from then on becomes increasingly foiled by the introduction of a sentimental dimension -- a social-moral reason for identifying with El-Limby. And as soon as he turns into a real anti-hero striving for credibility, Saad fails to be convincing. With the irony lost, the action is neither sufficiently humorous nor sufficiently moving. So far, however, the Limby of the first film continues to predominate. While cleaning the bathroom, he overhears two inmates hiding in a toilet chamber -- a homosexual innuendo that turns out to involve a joint they are sharing. While they smoke, the inmates discuss their plan to escape hidden in the vegetable cart. At the assigned hour El-Limby joins them; ludicrously they are caught while he manages to resume the journey safely out of the prison precincts.
In another memorable scene, El- Limby has just arrived at the neighbourhood where he lives. He knows the police will be after him, but he apparently has nowhere else to hide. As soon as his presence is registered the neighbours begin to fuss over him so loudly and so intensely his recapture is certain. An ironic comment on Egyptian society reminiscent of the first film, this. Yet its purpose is to advance the action in an altogether different direction. While he tries to silence his neighbours, El-Manfalouti has found out about his escape and determined to capture him with his own hands. On the arrival of the police at the neighbourhood El-Limby steals the motorcycle of his aforementioned friend and thus begins a complex car chase ending in a fatal accident. Both men are about to die, but one of them can be saved using part of the other's brain -- an unexpected sci-fi proposition that undermines the credibility of the plot from this point forward -- and this is what the doctor (Kamel) independently decides to do. The person who survives the operation has El- Manfalouti's body and El-Limby's mind -- a fact capitalised on immediately by El-Manfalouti's corrupt assistant, Adam (Hosni), who sees in El- Limby replacing the deceased as the prison warden a chance to carry out the lucrative deal he strikes with a rich inmate: to let him out and place someone else in his cell in return for an enormous sum. Blackmailing the doctor and tutoring El- Limby, Adam proceeds to do just that. And he just about gets away with it...
Enter the voice of conscience. A younger officer who has discovered the scam pleads with the newborn El-Manfalouti to do something about it. The lip problem, people notice, has disappeared. El- Manfalouti is far more kind-hearted than he used to be. At home he has made friends with his daughter; his wife is delighted with her new life with him (on the basis of the same younger officer's advice, El- Manfalouti has begun to woo her all over again). This new Manfalouti has yet to sleep with his wife, though; El-Limby cannot bring himself to impersonate El-Manfalouti in this respect. She is so disoriented by the transformation that has beset him she eventually visits the doctor, who secretly tells her exactly what happened (as the viewer subsequently finds out) and she says or does nothing about it. Notwithstanding El-Limby's many blunders in El-Manfalouti's life -- the source of much hackneyed comedy -- it is this complete shift in the film's focus that results in its undoing. It eventually becomes apparent that the prisoner Adam released is a corrupt businessman (played by Sami El-Adl) who has defaulted on loans and plans to leave the country with the money -- an enemy of the nation. El-Limby refuses to succumb to Adam's threats: he appears at the airport at the last minute, preventing the businessman's escape just in time. The film ends with El-Limby walking down an empty road in his underwear, in tears, having taken off the officer's uniform and tendered his resignation, with his wife following on the opposite side of the road, crying out, "Please come back. I love you, Riyad," and then, "I love you, Limby..."
