While Hani Mustafa reviews the latest record-breaking comedy, a hoard of visual and aural contradictions, Iman Hamam, driving across Cairo, registers the city's visual mythologies Following years of crisis, Egyptian cinema has turned into a commercial battle ground with a handful of stars fighting among themselves for the greatest share of the market. Films aim not only at overtaking the box office but staying on for as long as possible -- a race in which comedy tends to come out the winner. This is not in itself a bad thing: it was comedy that rescued the Egyptian film industry, after all, returning the audience to movie theatres. In recent summer seasons (June to September), the new wave of star-centred comedies has repeatedly broken the LE10 million mark, bringing in three times their production costs. In the present season, Buha, Mohamed Saad's latest vehicle, directed by Rami Imam, seems to be beating the competition. Saad broke box- office records with his 2002 Al-Limbi ( followed by a sequel entitled Eli Bali Balak ), which propelled him to the rank of such older stars as Adel Imam and Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz, as well as the new-wave pioneer Mohamed Heneidi; he was the top earning star for a very long time after that. Saad's originality rested on the character of Al-Limbi, the young man from a low-income Cairo neighbourhood who first appeared in the late Allaa Waleyyedin vehicle Al-Nazir, directed by Sherif Arafa. An irrational, easy excitable braggart, Al-Limbi induces laughter when he is confronted by the truly powerful or strong. But his fame may have to do with the average layman's foolish desire to stand up to a potential intimidator. It is an identification Adel Imam managed to establish in the 1970s and 1980s, playing characters from the bottom of the social ladder who challenge those higher up. One could argue that Saad's films operate within the same framework -- and that it is the detail that distinguishes them. One such detail is that, while Imam's characters were rational agents with no speech impediments, Saad's are semi- retards. Among his achievements, indeed, is this remarkable ability to impersonate drug addicts and drunks -- imitating their garbled speech especially. This mode of extracting laughter belongs in the tradition of Ali El-Kassar's films of the 1930s and 1940s, in which the voice of a typical Aswan character, combined with a marked level of ingenuousness, makes for roundabout identification. In Buha Saad's similar technique -- employed to powerful effect in all his previous films -- is varied even further: he repeats mispronounced verses, sayings and phrases in an attempt to correct them, mispronouncing them in yet a different way every time. In some scenes the editing adds to the humorous effect: the scene is divided into extremely fast shots taken from the same angle, a technique also employed in the way movement is depicted, Saad's absurd gestures echoing his speech. The film starts with a scene that stresses the idea of weakness in confrontation with strength. Buha is among friends in the village where Abu Ismail lives; the viewer finds out they have just had a battle with Abu Ismail's sons: the coffee house where they had been sitting is in ruins; many of them bear the marks of blows. One of the friends introduces the main character: "If Buha had been with us we would've beaten them." Buha eventually appears, satisfying the curiosity thus generated. But even as he fights them, the viewer never sees Abu Ismail's sons. It eventually transpires that he did not beat Abu Ismail's sons, after all. Scared and bleeding, his clothes tattered, he appears holding his hands up in prayer, thanking God for his safety. It is at this point that Buha finds out his cattle-rearing father has died, leaving him a sizable sum of money. But the LE500,000 in question are in the possession of a Cairo slaughterhouse butcher, Mahrous El Dab'. That's when Buha moves to Cairo to procure his money -- one of several dynamics driving the script forward. Another is that of the gig, the first instance of which is Buha failing to find a taxi to take him to the slaughterhouse. He ends up in a nightclub recommended by a friend -- where he has another fight by sheer coincidence. The third dynamic relates to Buha meeting Kouta (Mai Ezzedin) and her mother Halawiat (Libliba), who own a piece of land in the slaughterhouse neighbourhood, part of which, a barn, a local strongman, Farag Thabet (Hassan Hosny), has set his eyes on acquiring. This casts Buha in the role of the traditional hero standing up to the bad guy. An interesting twist, courtesy of script writer Nader Salah, makes this more interesting than it would have been: Buha works on the assumption that Thabet has information that will lead to Al Dab', and so attempts to break into Thabet's circle by becoming one of his assistants. From then on the feature turns into a light detective film in which an officer, Maher (Magdi Kamel) uses Buha as a snitch to expose Thabet's illegal activities. At this point, typically of new-wave comedies, we lose track of Kouta and her mother and instead follow Buha's propitious fortunes as he becomes a shop owner while still working for the police. Only at the very end are the various strands of the story pulled back together -- through an intense crisis. Thabet and his assistants frame Buha for their illegal activities in the process. But when Maher just happens to lose his memory in a car accident, the only way to clear Buha is to help him recover.... But it is with much reservation that one judges the film, in the end, as a slapstick comedy a la Ali El-Kassar or Laurel and Hardy.
