A double-take?
Hani Mustafa takes a sidelong glance at an Egyptian version of a European genre
Harb Atalia -- shouldn't that be Harb Italia, to translate as "War of Italy"? Well, no. The fact is that the filmmakers borrowed the title from an old child's game in which stones are hurled onto a gunpowder-smeared surface to produce a clattering sound. It seems likely that the game acquired this name at the time of Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia, in 1935. In Arabic, "Atalia" was the popular rendition of "Italia".
In "War of Atalia", director Ahmed Saleh and screenwriter Hazem El-Hadidi offer their own take on the European action movie. Popular in the 1970s and 1980s, these were low-budget films that eschewed the sophisticated technological gimmicks of Hollywood and relied, instead, on a fast- paced plot to move the action, often by means of a chase, from one scenic setting to another. Usually located in Italy or France, especially in their picturesque capitals, such settings are among the genre's attractions. One representative example is the film Le Casse which, directed by Henri Vereuil and starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Omar Sharif, combines poor technique with beautiful settings.
The same applies to "War of Atalia", so much so that most of the film was actually shot in Italy. A kind of explanation of the title is put into the mouth of the protagonist Yassin (Ahmed El-Saqqa) when he tells his father, a captain, that he is facing a ferocious war. The credit sequence shows two characters, one of whom may be El-Saqqa, the one killing the other, while a woman, clearly Nelly Karim, runs away screaming. This is aimed at shock value: it is not so much an introduction to the film, as an attempt to snare the attention of the audience to a story whose hero is killed at the start.
The following scenes take the viewer chronologically back in time, a technique often used in this genre, with the main characters and the premise only introduced in later sequences. It takes a particularly skilled screenwriter to carry this through, since if mishandled it can lead to confusion and boredom. The latter is most definitely the case with "War of Atalia", despite the filmmakers' desperate attempt to keep the audience hooked through suspense. In the second sequence, for example, a man called Bakr (Khaled Saleh) is kidnapped by two figures: a man in a cap (perhaps in reference to Belmondo of the original European genre) and a bearded man who threatens him with a gun, only to end up leaving him, stripped to his underwear, in the middle of the desert.
The next scenes take you straight to the heart of the matter. Yassin had worked as a lawyer in a legal firm belonging to a man called Kamal. This firm represents the businessman Bakr, who is involved in smuggling in partnership with an Italian mafioso, Franco. The desert scene is part of a vendetta against Bakr and Kamal, the immediate aim being to intercept an antique necklace on its way out of the country, to Rome.
Bakr's counter-plot to retrieve the necklace before it is smuggled to Italy is to kidnap Yassin's fiancee, Hana (Nelly Karim), taking her to Rome, where she is to be exchanged for the jewel. Over and above its dramatic significance, this is clearly a pretext for relocating the action to Rome, one of the stock settings of European action films. As is customary in detective films, the film periodically withholds information, and indeed gives false clues in the form of misleading flashbacks.
One example is when Yassin, in an airport scene, accosts Nader's mother (Sana' Yunis), a supposed stranger, asking her to keep the handbag that contains the necklace. Another is when Fouad (Khaled Abul-Naga) goes to speak to Nader's mother in Italy, and Nader (Magdi Kamel) throws him out of the house.
When the film ends with the ruse whereby Bakr and Franco are arrested by the Italian police, the question remains as to what is signified by these flashbacks, which tricked not only the two partners but the viewer as well. By the end of the film it transpires that Yassin, Fouad and Nader had been friends since their undergraduate days, during which time they travelled to Italy, and only Yassin returned to Egypt.
Withholding facts about the ruse until the end of the film made for a certain chaos, in the end. One can also take issue with the contrived nature of the chase scenes, which were of no dramatic value but rather served to showcase the cinematography and visually exploit the cityscapes of Rome. The director seems to have instructed the actors to exaggerate for comic effect, aiming again for the formula of the European action film. However, the modest talents of most of the cast meant that the acting was over the top, especially in the case of Ahmed El-Saqqa and Khaled Abul-Naga.
If the film falls short of delivering a satisfying adaptation of European action, it at least brings the genre into the repertoire of Egyptian cinema, where future attempts may be more successful.
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