Since 1997, the start of the rise of the new comedy, star-vehicles in the genre have raised serious questions about what artistic achievements comedy has made. Several of the comedy stars in question had managed to bring back an audience to the box office – the end of a serious crisis that afflicted the film industry through the 1990s, resulting in the fall of production levels to three-four films per year. Among the comedies that contributed to reversing this trend were (starring Mohammed Heneidi) Karim Diaeddin's Ismailia Rayeh Gayy (Ismailia To and Fro, 1997), Said Hamid's Saeedi fil Gam'a Al-Amrikiya (An Upper Egyptian at the American University, 1998) and (starring the late Alaa Waleyyeddin) Sherif Arafa's Abboud ala El-Hodoud (Abboud at the Front, 1999) and Al-Nazer (The Headmaster, 2000). It was in the latter film that yet another star-to-be, Mohammed Saad, made his first appearance as the actor's cinematic alter-ego, Al-Limbi. Saad's roles hitherto had been secondary and never comic, but after Al-Nazer Saad made several vehicles of his own starring that character: Wael Ihsan's Al-Limbi (2002), Elli Bali Balak (You Know Who, 2003) and later in Asharaf Faik's Al-Limbi 8 Gega (2010). In the meantime, and through several other, rather similar characters, Saad polarised the audience into extreme fans and extreme haters. Such beginnings prophesied a brilliant future for the art of comedy in Egypt, and they were indeed followed by the emergence of a number of even younger talents in the field like Ahmad Helmi and Ahmad Eid. Such work relied on irony and verbal comedy (puns and, especially, slurs in the case of Saad), and it was utterly divorced from the kind of comedy offered by pioneers like Naguib Al-Rihani in the 1930s-40s or even Fouad Al-Mohandess in the 1950s-80s. Yet verbal comedy was not the invention of those stars; it had been an essential component of the school of the great comedian Ismail Yasine, for example. Yet they gave it a new and contemporary edge. It can in fact be said that these comedians were offering variations on motifs of Yasine's. No doubt the current economic crisis following the revolution, and its escalation under Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood, has resulted in a great drop in the number of films being produced yearly. It seems few film producers are willing to risk their money during such a period of political upheaval. It is only one company, Al-Sobki, that has continued to produce wholly commercial fare, with comedy at the forefront of their work for many years. Indeed, in general, the crisis has not affected comedy as much; what has happened, rather, is a deterioration in the quality of comic films and the verbal comedy they contain. The Internet-connected younger audiences, especially in the wake of the revolution, are themselves verbal comedians of the highest order and therefore quick to notice such failures; they are indeed the harshest critics of those films. In this sense it can be said that comic cinema has failed to keep up with the rise in political comedy, not only on the Internet but in the mainstream media and through such arts as graffiti and song. Saad's response to the revolution, Ticktick Boom, directed by Ashraf Faik in 2011, was one such failure, not only in its political vision but in its humour and comic strategy as well. Perhaps the present Saad vehicle, Tattah, directed by Sameh Abdel-Aziz, is an attempt to make up for Ticktick Boom. *** In Tattah Saad attempts to embrace the new, post-revolution humour in search of a new source of comedy. This is a work that relies on an exceptional and well thought out character, Tattah, who bears a strong family resemblance to Saad's trademark characters (Al-Limbi, Bouha, Okal, Katkout, Boushkash etc.): dispossessed and disinherited people whether Al-Limbi in Cairo, Bouha in the Delta or Katkout in Upper Egypt, even though the socioeconomic dimension was never clear in any of these films except the first and (arguably still) the best, Al-Limbi. In Tattah Saad goes back to the ins and outs of the material like of the lower middle class in Cairo. This is a real-life urban character: the maternal uncle who bears the burden of his nephew's upbringing and education in the absence of a father (the nephew, Hadi, is played by Amr Mustafa Metwaly). This, despite the uncle having a problem in his nervous system that makes movement difficult and perhaps also explains Tattah's slowness. This is clear in the opening scene when, going about his business distributing the papers, Tattah goes to a neighbourhood other than the one he is assigned. In the second scene, we see Tattah with the butcher (Sayed Ragab) who owns the building in which he lives. The writer Mohamed Al-Nabawi and screenwriter Sameh Sirelkhetm may have drawn their dramatic connections (including the link between the poor tenant and the butcher landlord) from Tolba Radwan's Al-Sefira Aziza (1961), starring Shoukri Sarhan and Souad Hosny. Here too is the same triangle in which the hero lives in the same building as the butcher and is in love with the butcher's sister. Unlike the old film, in which the hero overcomes his fear of the butcher and plucks up the courage to propose to his sister, in Tattah it is the butcher's sister (Marwa) who seduces Tattah in order to secure for her brother Tattah's legal nullification of his write to live for the rest of his life in the apartment (at the old rent rates). Otherwise the screenplay proceeds through a weak dramatic structure that seems merely a pretext for presenting a series of adventures and sketches. One of Tattah's neighbours is a man who likes to cook, for example; it becomes clear that he worked as a chef for a rich man who, following family troubles when he decided to hide a large amount of money, was greatly helped by the chef. The chef was therefore rewarded with a hefty some which his employer left him with his own daughter (Dolly Chahine), who lives abroad. On his deathbed in hospital, the chef asks Tattah to find the girl and bring him the money, of which he promised to grant him a good portion. On Skype, Tattah is given a number which he imagines is a phone number with a missing figure, assuming that it is the phone of someone who will lead him to the money. He tries out different numbers, with the help of his nephew, each time unwittingly entering a new adventure. Through these sketches Saad's own concerns and his fear of the comic structure becomes apparent: here he ensures there is plenty of room for making fun of the ongoing political situation, capitalising on the humour of social networks. This may be a copout, but it betrays a legitimate fascination with the language and laughter of Facebook and Twitter, through which politicians are humiliated and derided on a regular basis. In one scene Tattah is watching television with Hadi, having had to leave their apartment to the butcher and moved to a room on the roof of the building, previously used by the butcher for illicit nights of pleasure. Tattah did not used to have the luxury of television, now – with his nephew – he is watching a popular TV series from the 1980s, in which the hero repeats a by now very well-known statement in a particular voice, speaking of himself while under torture: “Abbas Al-Daww says no.” Tattah responds: “Wasn't this guy there for the referendum. It's ‘yes' now.” Likewise when Tattah visits the veteran comedian Samir Ghanem (playing himself in a cameo), in the course of his search for the chef's money, Ghanem assumes that he is an actor sent by the production company to revise a small role, but Tattah is so clueless about his lines that Ghanem has to keep whispering them in his ear, recalling a notorious incident in which the Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood Mohamed Badie kept whispering the word qassass (“retaliation”) into President Morsi's ear while the latter was giving his speech, reminding him of promising the people to retaliate for “the martyrs of protests” – initially to no avail. Yet such scenes – and this is the principal virtue of this film – are not cut off from the humane substance they allude to. Despite the lack of a dramatic structure, it just may be that Saad has injected life back into a dying genre after all.
