Mohamed El-Assyouti finds veteran producer Hussein El-Qala's Awqat Faragh (Leisure) commendable, inasmuch as it addresses the bulk of its audience directly At a 4pm show the audience, mostly 10 to 20 year-olds, alternated between moments of quiet, empathetic comments and bored giggles. The women in the audience completely identified with, and reacted to, the protagonist who lets her boyfriend have his way only to be jilted. Egyptian men, stereotypically, will never marry someone who submits to their advances. The lives of the characters consist of leisure time. Adolescents, especially the boys, smoke cigarettes and shisha, do drugs, drink alcohol, chase prostitutes and watch pornography on their computers and cell phones. Yet they long to repent and lead a religious life, as well as have regular jobs and be independent. The problem with both their current way of life, and the one to which they aspire, is that both are too boring. Rebelling against father and teacher, taking the advice of the mosque preacher, learning a lesson from the death of Tareq, a friend who was hit by a car, and whose final words were "I'm afraid to meet Him" -- it is all too banal for these teenagers who sense family and society have conspired to stifle them, giving them no space of their own. In the finale of the film the three friends are hanging at the top of a wheel in a park and no one on the ground seems to realise that the wheel is dysfunctional and that they are riding it. Hazem is the son of a rich doctor and a society woman who suddenly realise they have neglected to check how he spends his time. They are contacted by the police after his girlfriend, Menna, reports their affair. The families of Menna and Hazem meet for the first time at the police station where their marriage is made official. Hazem then divorces Menna, who soon after marries her basketball coach. Menna had been persuaded to don the veil after listening to Amr Khaled preach, only to remove it shortly after. When a photo of her in a revealing blouse is passed among her fellow university students she returns to the veil, then removes it again only to put it back on after she has sex with Hazem. Tareq quits cigarettes, drugs, alcohol and women to become a practicing Muslim only to return to his old habits before his fatal accident. Amr -- who serves as alter-ego for the young scriptwriter Omar Gamal -- advises his friends that when they start on the religious path they have to take it gradually and not qafsh (in an extreme manner). Amr's problem is that his father, who has left the house and married another woman, insists that he should continue to study engineering. But Amr wants to become a writer and applies to become a trainee at the newspaper where his maternal uncle works. Ahmed's problem is that his father is very strict. When his father kicks him out of the house after the police have caught him smoking drugs, his hard- working girlfriend stands by him. She often urges him to stop doping and to devote his time to studying like her. She intervenes with her uncle to find Ahmed a job in the tourism business, but the uncle is disappointed by his lack of skills. Like Amr, Ahmed soon discovers his professional prospects are narrow given the absence of skills, motivation and experience. Among the older generation in the film there is a high-ranking police officer whose son is caught smoking drugs then let off the hook, and a professor-uncle who gives his nephew straight A's. The film's intention is to diagnose the ills of Egyptian society as reflected in the behaviour of the young. Its major fault is that it attempts to create too comprehensive a portrait of today's youth culture. The characters chosen, with the exception of Ahmed's girlfriend, seem to be rather negative types, and the various wrong deeds committed are assembled less to illuminate the motives of particular characters than to present a composite picture of society's ills, though without ever questioning the nature of what is and is not moral. The way the characters deal with their adolescent problems points to general trends in Egypt nowadays; their attitudes towards religion, women and work stand out in this respect. The only possible escape routes the three boys can conceive of are religion, a stable committed relationship with a girlfriend who, of course, refuses sex before marriage, and a regular job procured with the help of a relative. And even if the ending of the film is left open, all three protagonists remain incapable of any sustained questioning of the options they face. The film's criticism of the social maladies it depicts does not move beyond a nudge and a hint. It focuses more on symptoms, hardly bothering to dig for their causes. The lack of opportunity, unemployment and nepotism, the commonly accepted notion that a woman's virtue lies in her possession of a hymen, are all broached in the script, only to be skirted around, as the film opts instead, to follow the familiar chain of dramatic development common to works about young people since the 1950s. How else could the audiences' expectations be gratified except through lessons learned through police intervention, being disowned by parents and accidental death? Samir Bahzan's cinematography is superb, if only the camera did not have to make all those blurry movements. Whether the scene takes place in Nozha, Roxy, Doqqi, Talaat Harb Square, a downtown street, the Shooting Club, Qatamiya or Muqqattam, Bahzan and director Mohamed Mustafa, a veteran assistant director making his debut, successfully capture rich details. The music by Robert Bishara and Tarek Tawakul is mostly over-dramatic and while some of the characters, particularly Amr, Tareq and Menna, are performed with the right degree of spontaneity and humour, the acting is mostly poor. The brain behind the whole endeavour, who returns with his company Al-Alamiya after years of watching the market from a distance, is producer Hussein El-Qala. In deciding to make a feature film to be released in the summer season with no stars and a cast of mostly first-timers, as well as two screenwriters and a director all making their debut, El-Qala has taken a calculated risk. The project, originally prepared by a young star director, banks on strong subject matter and characters that will appeal to the majority of filmgoers, who are also adolescents. And the calculation is likely to pay off. Awqat Faragh (Leisure), despite its faults, is a commendable effort, opening the door to a cinema that speaks directly to the bulk of audience.
