Parody, politics and Hani Mustafa A film, a high-profile meeting and not a little debate: on the occasion of comedy superstar Adel Imam's latest vehicle, Al-Sifara fil-Imara, Al-Ahram Weekly visits the pro- versus anti-normalisation debate Al-Sifara fil-Imara (The Embassy in the Building) is yet another film dealing with the Arab-Israeli conflict. Since 1948 but especially since the October 1973 War, it has been a constantly recurring theme, often in naïve commercial depictions of the Egyptian army crossing the Suez Canal. October War films subsided towards the end of the 1980s, giving way to a new, Intifada-inspired wave -- filmmaker Ali Idris's Asshab Walla Business (Friends or Business), and Mohamed Abu Seif's Batal Min Al-Ganoub (A Hero from the South), both made after 2000, capitalised on Arab anger against Israeli barbarity in both Palestine and southern Lebanon. But Amr Arafa's Al-Sifara fil-Imara, written by Youssef Maati, is the first such film to adopt a comic perspective. Prior to its release, many speculated that it would ridicule anti-normalisation stance and the general boycott of Israeli presence in Egypt; no one could imagine how else the topic could be dealt with in a comic framework. The film proved them wrong. The two dynamics that generate the comedy throughout are established early on. First, the viewer is presented with a model of the apolitical Egyptian, so absorbed in the little concerns of his life he has never heard of Kofi Annan and does not know what a UN resolution is. Laughter will stem smoothly from placing him in a political situation -- he returns to Egypt after 25 years in the Gulf, only to discover that the apartment next to his has become the Israeli Embassy. Secondly, Sherif Khairi (Adel Imam), the man in question, is a womaniser -- another reason he is implicated in politics. The opening scenes establish that he has a particularly active love life, and lead up to him starting an affair with his boss's wife. He also happens to be in the habit of using his girlfriends' underwear as jacket pocket handkerchiefs, and in one scene the boss recognises his wife's underwear -- that is how Sherif is sacked and thus forced to come home. But it is around Dalia Shohdi (Dalia El Behiri), a leftist activist, that much of the action revolves, and this is how his political cluelessness and love of women are combined to deliver an even more potent dose of comedy: following her around Cairo, he ends up joining an anti-Israeli demonstration, and then attending and speaking at an anti-normalisation conference at the headquarters of a left-wing party downtown -- all simply to add Dalia to his collection of girlfriends. The next string of predicaments, while furthering the comic cause, perform a central dramatic function: Sherif's personality alters as he suffers from the security measures in place at his apartment building, fails to sell it and loses all his belongings when a missile hits the apartment in his absence. Asking his lawyer friend (Ahmed Rateb) to sue the embassy, he becomes increasingly involved in the anti-normalisation cause. Once the legal proceedings are underway, indeed, it is no longer up to him to be involved: overnight, almost, he has turned into a popular hero of the opposition and a symbol of the struggle against normalisation. Israeli intelligence consequently trap him into sleeping with a woman, video the night they spend together and blackmail him until he drops all charges. This time, in the public sphere, he becomes a traitor overnight. Here as elsewhere the film is a travesty of social and personality types: the Islamic militants who kidnap Sherif, forcing him to wear a belt of explosives, and the left-wing anti-Israeli intellectual, to mention but two examples. Thus begins the more inappropriate registers of fun: not only otherwise respectable characters but even the work of the Sixties iconic poet Amal Donqol is crudely mocked when Sherif's friend, a left-wing journalist (Ahmed Siam) suggests that the former should have recited Donqol's poem to the state security officer (Khaled Zaki) who had interrogated him about his neighbours. In Sherif's stoned rendition of the poem, phrases are altered to suit the drug culture. Whatever the case, people like Sherif will never have use for poetry. Dalia's family is likewise presented in a burlesque manner. She lives with her uncle, his wife and two sons. The communists stance of both father and mother is indicated by a large picture of Karl Marx that hangs in their living room. Dalia reveals that, while they underwent their long stints of political detention, the children were brought up by Comrade Nanny Attiat, who has read all of Russian literature. Such exaggeration performed a comic function in scenes like Sherif's birthday, at which the Shohdis meet the Israeli ambassador (Lotfi Labib), who walks out of the house bearing the cake he had bought for Sherif in a hint at the stereotypical miserly Jew. But it is the ending of the film that strikes the least convincing note. In a naïve twist, Sherif is forced to host an Israeli Embassy reception at his apartment, under pressure of the tape. While the reception goes on, Sherif is at the entrance of the building watching the news from Palestine with a group of security guards. It is by sheer coincidence that he sees Iyad, the son of his former Palestinian colleague at the Dubai oil company -- shot dead by Israeli soldiers. Sherif has always considered Iyad like a son and the sight prompts him to run back up and kick out the Israelis; the slow motion of this scene is exaggerated and theatrically rhetorical. Politics aside, the film is of good value from the viewpoint of comedy -- it is capable of competing with new-wave comedies even despite Adel Imam being two or three generations older. Once again Adel Imam lives up to his reputation for rejecting the concept of "clean films" that avoid sex, drinking and drugs. Once again he is faithful to the details of daily life, producing convincing situations that nonetheless generate laughter.
