When the message is the medium there is little pleasure to be found, writes Hani Mustafa The period prior to the holiday season is usually seen as dead as far as film revenues are concerned. Distributors prefer to hold back films so that they can be premiered during the holidays and hopefully attract a share of the revenues generated during the festive season. This year the holidays came with a vengeance, with Coptic Christmas and Eid Al-Adha almost overlapping, offering distributors and producers an opportunity to double revenues. Among the films released before the festivities, no doubt in an attempt to grab some attention before vehicles with more established box-office draws were released, was Montaha Al-Laza (Ultimate Pleasure). With the exception of Hanan Tork (whose character is also called Hanan) and Menna Shalabi (Mona), it contained no stars likely to appeal to audiences given the option of attending films starring, among others, Ahmed Helmi, Hani Salama, Youssra, Mona Zaki, Mustafa Shabaan, all of whom were in vehicles scheduled for a prime holiday release. That said, the rest of the cast of Montaha Al-Laza -- Soad Nasr, Ahmed Rateb, Magdi Kamel and the Lebanese pop star Youri Mraqadi -- are by no means unknown, though they are hardly box office stars in the traditional sense. But the timing of the release may well have placed Montaha Al-Laza at a disadvantage. Fenced in between the Cairo Film Festival and the holiday season, it had only a few weeks in which to make money. Director Manal El-Saifi's first feature-length film opens with the credits superimposed over a scene in which Tork wanders along a beach in a flowing white dress, seemingly invisible to the people around her. It is a ghost-like representation clearly intended to foreshadow the death of Tork's character at the end of the film. We soon find out that Hanan, married to Sherif, the owner of a clothing and accessories shop, has lost the will to live, an unfortunate state of affairs brought on by the death of her father and which persists despite the love and care offered by her husband. Hanan's depression, which results in suicide attempts, inevitably takes its toll on her husband, played by Mraqadi, and their marriage begins to disintegrate. Sherif, a Lebanese who has lived in Egypt since his childhood, loses control completely by the middle of the film, and begins a relationship with the 17- or 18-year-old daughter of his cook -- played by Soad Nasr -- and driver -- played by Ahmed Rateb. The relationship progresses in traditional melodramatic fashion, recounted in scenes which could easily have been lifted from a vintage 1950s film. Subject to the rages of her father, the girl finds no place to hide except in Sherif's shop. Thus is the audience prepared for the growing relationship between the two, a relationship articulated in a five decade-old cinematic vocabulary as the actors move off-screen. What next? Crashing waves, perhaps, or a kettle spurting steam? Not quite, though the scene's ending, with the lights of the shop flashing on and off, is hardly an improvement on the more traditional gambits to avoid portraying physical relations. Theirs is not the only complex relationship in a film depicting problems in three different households. Ahmed (Magdi Kamel) -- a former classmate of Sherif -- is neglected by his wife Mona who prefers to spend her free time on the Internet, where she is engaged in a virtual relationship with an old friend. Ahmed and Mona's troubles appear to stem from their positioning within the middle classes. Finding her arranged marriage wanting, Mona seeks what she assumes is lacking on the Internet. And then there is Montaha Al-Laza 's foray into the working class household of Sherif's driver Sayed, a drug addict who squanders the savings of his wife, Sherif's cook, devastating her dream of completing the omra, in a sub-plot reminiscent of the spate of TV movies against addiction. This is clearly a film with a message, a genre in which the late actor and producer Hussein Sidqi specialised in the 1940s and the 1950s. And in its determination to promote its message, Montaha Al-Laza formed a one-dimensional drama, relying on stereotypical characters and a problem and solution formula. Ahmed, a professor of philosophy, lectures on morality then goes to stand on the top of the Muqattam Hills to contemplate his wife's infidelity, and prays. Religion comes to be increasingly foregrounded. When the cook's desire to go on pilgrimage assumes mystical overtones this is a logical, if exaggerated, development. Hanan's monologue as she drives her car around Cairo, which develops into a sermon about the veil and a harangue against women who wear it and jeans is far from logical, and could easily have been written by one of the "new preachers'. So intent is the film on delivering its message that it comes increasingly to resemble a public information commercial, abandoning any pretence at being a well-built drama. With scenes divided equally between the different story lines any coherent rhythm is jettisoned. The censor reputedly interfered in the title of the film, refusing to allow its screening until the word "life" had been added in small letters to the original title, "Life: Ultimate Pleasure". Quite why this was deemed necessary is anyone's guess. And on the subject of guessing games Montaha Al-Laza 's producers offered prizes during a radio show to anyone who can identify what the ultimate pleasure was for the different characters. Any takers?
