Light, more light

Mohamed Khan's Ayyam El-Sadat grants Nur Elmessiri a glimpse of the terrifying power and glory
"I was a hair's breadth away from the noose," a young Anwar El-Sadat released from solitary confinement, charged with collaborating in the assassination of royalist Amin Osman, says to his friend Hassan Ezzat. They are on their way to spend a few days by the sea. It is night-time, the side of the road. He slams the car boot shut. The tie around his neck is caught. In the dark they laugh.
Mohamed Khan's Ayyam El-Sadat (Days of Sadat) brilliantly traces the tightening of the noose of history around a man's psyche. Though the film is long, it is masterfully focused, no small achievement given the genre, a historical drama of sorts spanning 40 loaded Egyptian years. The subject of the film, who, through a chain of situations, found himself centre stage under the glaring spotlight of history, is treated thoughtfully, sensitively and with the respect owing to all human beings great or small.
As is the viewer's intelligence. Unlike the two 1990s Nasser films to which the Egyptian cinema- going public was subjected, Days of Sadat is no facile infotainment item masquerading as historical epic. It is a psychodrama that gets under the skin of its complex subject. Whether you are "pro" or "anti" Sadat is irrelevant. Presented with this filmic rendition of autobiographical material, you get a taste of the agonisingly difficult thing it must have been to be a person who came into his own historically and psychologically in the shadow of a giant.
That the script by Ahmed Bahgat is based on the memoirs of Jihane and Anwar El-Sadat should not necessarily be a point of contention. In the eyes of the public, the life story of a public figure cannot but be official, comprised of what, with the hindsight of history, are public events. The death of a friend, if the friend is Gamal Abdel-Nasser and you are his vice president, is a public event.
28 September 1970: the film begins. In the sepia tones of an old photograph Sadat climbs the staircase, past grieving family members in the background, climbs to where under a white sheet lies -- cut to: a black and white framed photograph on a wall of the historical icon that the dead man had already become while living and under which sits a Sadat wary of becoming Egypt's next president. Prevailed upon by the strong men of the Nasser regime, he says Ala barakitillah (With Allah's blessings). Cut to millions in Cairo's streets, weeping, wailing, wielding photos and portraits of the dearly departed leader -- black and white footage of Nasser's funeral with Sadat's voice-over reading the broadcast farewell speech. A few scenes later, President Sadat addresses the People's Assembly: "The void that Nasser left behind him cannot be filled by one man." And then one man's arrival, Sadat's, in uniform to the opulent vast and open spaces of Abdin Palace: a tiny figure, alone and anxious, climbs the processional staircase to a study too big for tears, panic or things human. He looks out the window -- and we are in flashback: peasant children, Anwar included, seated on the floor at a Qur'an lesson reciting: Qul lan yusibana illa ma kataba Allahu lana (Say nothing will befall us except what Allah has written for us).
While the second half of Ayyam El-Sadat spans the years of Sadat's presidency, the first half is in flashback, spanning Sadat's early years in the army, his imprisonment and interrogation twice (both times for anti-British activities), his escape once, the failure of his first marriage, his meeting and marrying of Jihane El-Sadat, his joining of the Free Officers, 1952, 1954, 1967 -- and 1970. Brilliant acting (Ahmed Zaki), remarkably intelligent cinematography (Tareq El-Telmissani), a meticulously attentive set (Onsi Abu Seif), and sophisticated use of documentary footage, in addition to flashback, contribute to imposing artistic form -- narrative, a gripping, emotionally-engaging and thought-provoking story in which a character develops -- on what would otherwise have been a mere string of events.
The most brilliant stroke of the film is the paradoxical manner in which light is deployed as an objective correlative of the protagonist's psychic state. Set and setting in Ayyam El-Sadat are not merely a backdrop, but an inextricable component of the story showing, among other things, the tightening of a noose around a (tragic?) protagonist's psyche. In the first half of the film, the light is delicate, shadows fall; there is nighttime; there are morning-time cafés and dinner time restaurants; there is a private life, early afternoon home; there is work, nocturnal Revolutionary Command Council tables. Though small, the chiaroscuro interiors of the first half of Days of Sadat are spaces where a man, Sadat, can breathe, where slouching and clowning around are in the natural order of things.
Yet, while the first half of the film shows us a Sadat at times carefree, at others anxious, a human being without too many nervous tics open to and able to engage with others as the situation calls, gradually (and Zaki's brilliant performance shows us this "gradually"), already, there are signs of the post-1970-Sadat on the walls: the theatricality subversive of serious discourse, the willingness to bluff one's way to survival, the love of sartorial finery, the love of the good joke. The future casts its reflection in the past; the second half of Days is foreshadowed in the first: solitary confinement -- eloquently expressed by the camera -- in the filthy, cramped prison cell 54; a figure perched on a vast white quarrying mountain alone with his thoughts of escape and pursuit under a merciless glaring midday sun.
High up on a mountain is a lonely place. Light can sometimes suffocate. In the second half of the film, with Sadat's ascent to presidential power, in addition to markedly more opulent interiors we are presented with shot after shot of the vast, spacious, luminous gardens of the numerous Sadat residences, rural and urban. Birds chirp almost surreally in holiday village manner; people in white glow almost supernaturally. Gone are the days when you could hang out with a group of friends at the local qahwa, gone the strolls along public beaches. Home becomes a stage, a trap even, one sequence with nervous camera movement shows, when they and you require bugging devices for survival. Collaborators once spilled the beans that brought you within a hair's breadth of the noose; your cabinet can conspire against you. Psychic survival and psychic isolation, when the extent of the power you are allowed to wield makes you larger than life, become flipsides of the same coin -- as do claustrophobic dark prison cells and vast sunlit palatial grounds when you are alone.
The detached, almost sinister camera gaze upon all those wide open luminous spaces gives the viewer eyes with which to see how the world must appear to a psyche which, subjected to extreme pressure, has detached from the complexities of social reality and has floated off into a lonely stratosphere -- as does the intelligent approach to integrating black and white archival material into a colour feature film. From the bubble of his private helicopter, Khan's Sadat looks down, alarmed and bewildered, at the bread riots -- what he would dub "the Thieves' Intifada" -- following his sudden decision to lift subsidies. His bewilderment is expressed, and perhaps explained, by splitting the seeing subject (Sadat) off radically from the object of vision: he is in one world (a helicopter, in a colour feature film); history, "the shout in the street," is unfolding in another (black and white footage and photographs).
Ironically, Zaki's performance shows, the more he floated away from the simple world of personal encounters, the more he began to take things personally. A student at Cairo University, one among the anonymous millions, given democratic leave to speak his mind at an assembly, is called "alilel-adab" (ill-bred) for bringing up the issue of corruption; "I let you guys out of prison, so no illet adab with me," Sadat tells a Muslim Brotherhood leader. Ascending to the luminous world of palatial presidential residences, the grip he could maintain on the home and childhood which he had left far behind inevitably took a histrionic form. "We of the countryside don't celebrate birthdays; at most, we'll cook a duck, or a goose....": televised words spoken -- in that unforgettable (endearing or exasperating) baladi informal manner of speech which became more pronounced the further away his rural past receded -- by Egypt's president of the numerous palatial residences, the same president who, at another point in Days, unabashedly declares: "It is we who make constitutions."
Not quite psychosis as with Marie Antoinette, but it must be so lonely when Allah has written that you become a prime mover. It cannot be fortifying to your ego if, as a beginner in being-president, about to deliver a Labour Day speech, you are greeted with an audience cheering for your dead predecessor. No one boos, but they hold up portraits of a dead man for you to look in as in a mirror. The only way to restore the order you need in order to speak, bismillah having failed, is to have everyone stand for a moment in the dead man's memory, and then in an almost desperate gesture towards survival, to declare "We are all Gamal Abdel-Nasser."
We never see Nasser's face. Whenever he appears he is in the dark, Sadat in the light. A Sadat in military uniform visits "my sons" on the front, and, flanked on either side by generals, he sits on a fold- up chair. Something flaps in the wind. A whispering echo of Kirosawa's Kagemusha: The Shadow Warrior.
From war and the glorious moment of breaking down what seemed an invincible barrier, the Barlev, Sadat moved on to what came to be called the peace process. "I feel I am under hissar nafsi (psychological siege)," Anwar confides to Jihane (competently played by Mervat Amin in the second half of the film and by Mona Zaki in the first half). They are strolling through the garden. He remembers solitary confinement in Cell 54. He will go to Geneva, to Jerusalem, to the end of the world.
And go to Israel he did. There are two discrete filmic parts to the Knesset speech: Sadat in a colour feature film lyricising, on the one hand; an eerily silent audience, documentary footage of the members of the Knesset including Golda Meier and Moshe Dayan, on the other. Hands make the sound of applause. He is in one world; everyone else, his audience, in another.
And when death arrives on the parade grounds, after prayer with your grandson, after the changing of costumes, after the one-man show that life is, the cameramen, you can be sure, will get you. "Light, more light." A smile. Who can tell how pitifully dark was the place from which Voltaire spoke those famous last words of his?
(For screening details, see Listings)
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