For a film so entitled, Mohamed El-Assyouti finds, Sayed El-Atefi (Sayed the Sentimental) is a remarkably muddled bag of sentiments Sayed is played by pop singer Tamer Hosni, whose cinematic debut coincides with the release of his latest album. Sayed is a law student who writes love letters and acts as agony aunt (hence his sobriquet, El-Atifi). Sayed is the disinherited son, victim of his paternal uncle's greedy misconduct. And Sayed is a student leader whose ardent nationalism solves all his problems. Say no to Israel, Ali Ragab's film seems to imply, and not only will you become rich and famous overnight; your love life will be sorted out, too. It all starts with an incident on campus. Sayed is courageous enough to voice objection to students being searched as they enter the lecture hall. The occasion is the presence of a visiting professor who also happens to be a minister, and Sayed is promptly suspended from Cairo University. His mother (Abla Kamel), a widowed taxi-driver, begs his businessman uncle to find him a job; said uncle has naturally embezzled Sayed of his inheritance, and they fall out when he lobbies to kick out Sayed's neighbour -- both colleague and love interest -- who lives on the rooftop with her handicapped father. To fight back, Sayed resorts to trickery: asked to write the speech his uncle will make at a reception for the minister of industry, Sayed fills it with insults to the minister; unsuspecting, his uncle reads it out as is. A major battle ensues: thugs beat Sayed's mother, throwing her out of the flat (since her husband's death she has had no official proof of ownership); Sayed's nephew appears among the studio audience of an on-air show in which the uncle is host and accuses him of sexually abusing him as a child. A story about the downtrodden in conflict with corrupt power, then; but there is more, and less, to Bilal Fadl's script. Sayed's father, as the mother reveals halfway through the plot, died a martyr in the Sinai wars. Sayed and his nephew are seen ripping tourists off, and the tourists turn out to be Israelis. Subsequently Sayed stands before the Israeli embassy brandishing a poster of Ariel Sharon with a swastika printed on it; he is joined by an ever larger crowd, turns into a national hero and starts giving speeches on campus; the very minister on whose account Sayed had been suspended now asks for his support in the upcoming elections. Thus Fadl preposterously unties all the knots he has woven, assigning the root social-economic problems that give rise to Sayed's predicament secondary importance -- a statement that finds support in that, while Sayed's social-economic problems are presented in the framework of comedy, the nationalist sentiments are conveyed with blatant melodrama. One could describe them as emotionally manipulative. And this is not to mention a poster of urban folk star Shaaban Abdel-Rehim, whose biggest hit was a song called Ana Bakrah Israeel (I Hate Israel). In the end Sayed defeats unemployment, social injustice and disappointment in love -- all thanks to a few anti-Israeli slogans. This mode of cinematic sloganeering has its recent precedents. Superstars Adel Imam and Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz had both played Egyptian heroic spies in television dramas when, in his top grossing hit Saedi fil Gamaa Al-Amrikiya (An Upper Egyptian at the American University, 1998), Mohamed Heneidi burned the Israeli flag -- a similar patriotic scenario that recurred in Heneidi's next hit Hammam fi Amsterdam (Hammam in Amsterdam, 1999), which featured an Egyptian-Israeli conflict in Holland. And in Ihab Radi's more serious Fatah min Israeel (A Girl from Israel), the protagonist's father was martyred in the Arab-Israeli conflict. A banal anti-Israeli statement runs through both films with a message and films without; and in the vast majority of cases intrudes on plot development, disappearing without making any impact on the dénouement. Depending on Hosni's popularity is another cheap tactic. Much of the film's promotion depended on Hosni's album, with posters announcing that Hosni would be singing with the audience following screenings. In the film he performs three songs, during which the action freezes and characters gather in the background, failing to perform any role. This is especially obvious in the final -- wedding -- scene, the most traditional Egyptian happy ending. That the wedding takes place in the Al-Ahli football team stadium, during a football game, is an interesting if controversial twist -- it threatens to antagonise supporters of Al-Ahli's archenemy, Al-Zamalek. Since Sayed's mother is an ardent Ahli supporter, however, the film features many training and match scenes -- and more crowds. Crowds ransack the rich man's residence, they demonstrate outside the Israeli embassy, and listen to Sayed's patriotic speech. Crowds watch the talk show in which Sayed's uncle is discredited, they gather around Sayed for amorous consultations, they morph into tourists of which Sayed and his nephew take advantage. Thus the filmmakers plant a surrogate audience within the dramatic fabric of the film -- to spread the diseases of laughter and excitement to the audience inside the movie theatre. Additionally, Hosni himself would come to selective screenings to make sure the effect is working. Yet, as if this is not sufficient, the actors shout their lines at the top of their voices. Sadly none of this takes away from the poor acting, unconvincing dialogue and clumsy cinematography typical of recent commercial formulae. Lighting levels vary from one set to another within the same scene; and hair extensions look like they were hastily added seconds before the filming. Such are the limitations of the El-Sobki Brothers production budget that the film is visually uninteresting. Indeed a straightforward revival of the "muqawalat", or contractors, film, that abominable phenomenon of the 1980s, with a clear end in view, might have solicited more respect. Even more annoying is the pretension to social-political import. Together with the bad jokes, this antagonised the Galaxy movie theatre audience, who quickly called the filmmaker's bluff. Laughs were very few and far between, in the end, and one wonders what could be said in favour of the movie.
