Hani Mustafa bewails a particular cinematic collapse Presenting a powerful idea is the scriptwriter's greatest challenge. This may be why, in filmmaking around the world, the dramatic substance of a script has often been gleaned from other media -- mainly literature -- and even now, despite drops in book consumption, commuters in many an industrialised country support a stable fiction market by devouring books on trains. In Egypt, where such a market no longer exists -- in contrast to the 1950s-70s, when novelists like Naguib Mahfouz, Ihsan Abdel-Quddous, Youssef Edris, Youssef El-Sebai and Abdel-Rahman El-Sharqawy provided the cinema with much substance -- films are seldom influenced by literature. Indeed, when they seek to depart from the predominant framework of light comedy, scriptwriters today will more often than not draw on older, often Hollywood films. This proves even more straightforward for the scriptwriter than drawing on a novel; the principal challenge becomes, rather, one of Arabisation or Egyptianisation. And yet this is not only reprehensible for being an imitation: the process has often proved disastrous in other, more significant ways, what with the idea remaining culturally or socially incompatible with its mode of presentation, resulting in a complete breakdown of the cinematic aesthetic, and confusing both filmmakers and viewers in the long run. In this sense filmmaker Ahmed Yusri's 45 Yom (45 Days) is a case in point. It has a powerful plot, captured effectively by scriptwriter Mohamed Hifzi, who is well-known for producing Egyptian versions of Hollywood films. The plot is, indeed, the principal advantage of the film being, in effect, a remake of Tim Robins' 1996 Dead Man Walking, for which Suzanne Sarandon received an Oscar and Sean Penn a (Berlin Film Festival) Silver Bear. It revolves around the relationship between a young man accused of killing his parents, Ahmed Ezzeddin (Ahmed El-Fishawi) and the psychiatrist to whom the authorities have sent him in order to determine if he can be spared capital punishment on grounds of insanity, Raheb Asaad (Hisham Selim); Selim replaces Sarandon, who played the nun determined to extract a confession out of the accused in Dead Man Walking and thereby save his soul. But instead of a gradual build-up of the link between the two characters, or at least some kind of explanation of how it developed -- indeed this was the approach taken by Robins, with Sarandon's dilemma vis-à-vis Penn occupying centre stage -- 45 Yom concentrates on a large number of details, none of which is fully developed or convincingly pursued. Raheb's quandary, for example -- in his report, should he tell the truth, that Ahmed is sane, or should he lie out of the sympathy he has developed for the young man? -- is hardly presented at all. Time is taken up by a wide variety of themes, most of which have no connection to this relationship. There is, for one thing, the character of the father, Ezzeddin (Ezzat Abu- Auf): the violence with which he treats his son, recalling a Medieval torturer, is never explained; it seems surprising in the light of his being a pilot. Besides, Ezzeddin is so well-heeled, ruthless and apparently uneducated it would have made more sense for him to work as a businessman. (Indeed neither Ezzeddin nor Raheb, who works at a state hospital, should belong to this social class at all, given their jobs, but their extravagant standard of living remains unexplained.) Nor is it clear why such a man should, with the exception of a single scene, remain at home for the duration of the film. The only reason offered for the father's cruelty to his son is a single sentence the mother utters, in which she explains that he was always suspicious of her and was never certain that Ahmed was his -- a preposterously naïve motive neither developed nor further explained. The same goes for the life of the psychiatrist, who is inexplicably estranged from his wife until we discover that they lost their first child -- once again, there is no further explanation. Nor does this state of instability at home serve the dramatic structure in any way. The protagonist does not seem to have any connection with the world, either, except for a short winter episode in the Mediterranean summer resort of Agami, where he meets a young woman who seems to bring out his humanity. Though more realistic and convincing, the episode is cut short when Ahmed returns to Cairo for his sister's birthday. In the birthday scene -- a seemingly private piano recital held in what appears to be the Mohamed Ali Tawfik Palace in Manial -- as elsewhere in the film, the video-clip aesthetic of unreasonable and unexplained extravagance acts to alienate the viewer. (Worth noting in this context is the fact that song videos make up the majority of the filmmaker's credits.) Nothing is more preposterous than the ending, however -- to the point of inducing unintentional laughter. Following Raheb's submission of the report -- he says that Ahmed can tell right from wrong -- it turns out that Ahmed had not actually killed his parents, but rather saw his father kill his mother and then take his own life -- and, to protect his sister's feelings, decided to blame himself for the crime. All of which Ahmed reveals at the very end, to a peripheral character, when it is already too late.
