Hani Mustafa deals with Mohamed Saad's latest The summer season this year is extremely short, making box-office revenue a real challenge -- and a difficult test for the stars. This year, many films such as Al-Dealer (The Dealer), starring Ahmed El-Saqqa and Khaled El-Nabawi, were desperate to compete. Earlier in the season, specifically, Mohamed Saad's latest vehicle, El-Limby 8 Gega -- directed by Ashraf Fayek -- went through a difficult struggle despite a seemingly assured position with Saad's popularity and that of the character of El-Limby. The summer season usually starts in June after the final exams at schools and universities, but this year it did not start until 10 July -- due to the activities of the World Cup which usually attracts large portion of the commercial cinema viewers, especially the young, capitalising on the anticipation that follows exam season and barely lasts one month till the start of Ramadan. After Ramadan there comes a brand-new film season, that of Eid Al-Fitr. Since his first film El-Limby directed by Wael Ihsan achieved the highest revenues in 2002, the comedian Mohamed Saad has been staking the summer season in particular, with his vehicles grossing consistently high revenues every year: Elli Bali Balak (You Know Who I Mean) in 2003, Okal in 2004, Buha in 2005. In 2007, abruptly, the moon of Saad began to wane with Katkout, which achieved less revenue than his previous films. His last two films, Karkar in 2007 and Boushkash in 2008, did not prove as popular. And in 2009 he had no projects. He probably was not drawn to any of the ideas with which he was no doubt presented, preferring to wait for a new hit. That is why the short summer season was such a hard challenge for Saad, his aim having been to present a hit with which to regain his phenomenal popularity through the unique antics of the character that made his name (first born in 2000 in the late comedian Alaa Walieddin vehicle Al-Nazer, scripted by Mohamed Abdallah and directed by Sherif Arafa ). But was El-Limby 8 Gega a winning choice? In truth the film depended on Saad's acting skills and his ability to bring El-Limby back to life, which in turn required original thinking. The many incarnations of El-Limby have nothing in common except a kind of speech impediment and a sense of belonging to the backwaters of the big city -- poor neighbourhoods, or slums -- as well as the restless search for enough money to live. In the present film, El-Limby has the same financial problems but he does not pursue a job since he already has one as a halgi, the man who composes official memos and legal documents at courts and government offices, a sort of self-employed clerk. Yet in this film the scriptwriter Nader Salaheddin went some distance away from the traditional stereotype of this occupation, bringing it closer to the figure of a swindler. El-Limby presents himself along with his law office as the attorney's agent, while he randomly picks a rural man with no legal support whose case is to be heard on the same day. El-Limby and his assistant (Youssef Abdu) eventually offer to help him claiming their office is brilliant with lawsuits while they search for a lawyer who can attend to request postponement, so that they can later share what legal fees are paid. The film proceeds to another phase of deception when El-Limby pretends he is himself a lawyer with a false ID from the Lawyers Syndicate, declaring he is the lawyer El-Limby Fathallah Ayish so that he can have all the money to himself. On the other hand there is El-Limby's personal problem, which revolves around his marriage to a primary school teacher (Mai Ezzeddin), with whom he cannot have children. The family side of the story is weakly portrayed, and in one vague scene the doctor explains that each can have children perfectly normally but only with another partner. Here as elsewhere the comedy does not rest on very convincing logic. But it is in the imaginative plot turn -- the central theme of the film -- that it flounders most clearly. While buying a new bed El-Limby has a fall hurting his head badly, and the doctor who saves him (Youssef Fawzi) happens to try a new experiment on his brain -- a fresh scientific achievement that involves planting a chip in the arm onto which huge amounts of data can be uploaded from any computer. The experiment proves a success when the doctor uploads the whole registry onto El-Limby's chip and in one of the finest scenes in the film El-Limby identifies a beggar as a secret detective and proceeds to expose him on the street -- which results in fellow beggars physically attacking the man who is planted to inform against them. Eventually the doctor uploads data showing that the problem between El-Limby and his wife is emotional, not biological. In a long sequence El-Limby takes advantage of his "gift" to rescue the owner of a microbus convoy accused to rape and to save another from capital punishment. But the script fails to draw out the hilarity that could have been generated by El-Limby's artificial intelligence or make use of what would otherwise have been an extremely powerful trope. It is probably due to the rush with which the script was completed that the script writer borrowed a ready-made formula from Youssef El-Siba'i's novel Ard Al-Nifaq (Land of Hypocrisy) -- later made into a film written by Saadeddin Wahba and directed by Fatin Abdel-Wahab, starring late comedian Foad El-Mohandes, actresses Shwikar and Samiha Ayoub, and screened in 1968 -- which involved the use of various pills in order to generate hilarious and often disastrous states of consciousness: honesty pills, love pills, etc. By mimicking -- or rather reversing -- the central idea in this classic comedy, which had as a basis and raison d'etre the task of critiquing Egyptian society, the script of Saad's latest failed to convey sufficient power or depth. More disastrously, it failed to make people laugh quite as much as it was meant to. It also had to descend into pure rhetoric, after the doctor introduces a virus that forces El-Limby -- now extremely rich and famous -- to confess his many sins in a speech that rings hollow.
