Hani Mustafa gets as close as he can get to film noir -- but does not reach it There is no denying that crime flicks tend to keep the viewer tied down to his seat -- with golden chains, as an old cinematic adage will have it. But it is equally true that they only flourish in the twilight zone separating serious film from cheap entertainment. Inherently, they require that extra bit of ingenuity, especially in script writing, to strike a convincing balance -- a concrete dramatic escalation, a unpredictable yet coherent thesis- antithesis-synthesis and a persuasively delineated sense of credibility. Thriving in Hollywood in the 1940s, film noir was a genre that seemed to strike just such a balance: classics like Tay Granett's The Post Man Always Rings Twice (1946) and Delmar Davis's Dark Passage (1947) are as gripping as they are profound; and they take their cue as much from an analysis of human motivation as from an understanding of the suspense technique. It is this game of noir that director Sandra Nashaat and scriptwriter Mohamed Hafzy attempt to play in their new film, Mallaki Eskenderiya (Alexandria Prive) -- a commercial film with a clearly artistic flavour. But crime is no easy task, requiring both a complicated dramatic structure and mastery of the language of cinema. Well-known is the fact that noir acquired its mood in the historically specific atmosphere of Western society in the wake of World War II: it relies on dim lighting (a fact reflected in its name), its protagonist (usually a detective) is socially alienated; and the script tends to be written from his point of view. In the generic formula, the start of the film heralds a fundamental change in this person's life, so in Alexandria Prive Adham (Ahmed Ezz) -- a lawyer working at the famous firm of Dr Shawqi (Sameh El-Seriti), since private eyes are nonexistent in Egypt -- manages to procure a document that makes one of the latter's important cases. It is clear that Adham sees law as a profession of trickery (rather than bribing the source for the document, he gambles it off of him); and when Dr Shawqi hands him the money, Adham uses it to find information that will help his client Sahar (Ghada Adel), accused of killing her husband, Hussein Noshi (Khaled Zaki), to whose family Adham goes in the guise of an engineer who had lived in Dubai. His pretext is paying back LE5,000 he owes Hussein. Noir traditionally provides for a mysterious and beautiful femme fatale lead -- who will readily become the moving force of the action -- another way in which the genre reflects post-war Western society, where women were gaining prominence. In Alexandria Prive, Sahar's allure is sufficient to change Adham's outlook. And in line with noir, the mystery is not wholly revealed until the end of the film. Montasir El-Dakroury (Khaled Saleh) -- Adham's colleague at the law firm -- takes on another of the genre's traditional roles, the corrupt cop, who will also be the protagonist's closest friend. He constitutes the third side of the film's dramatic triangle, occupying a vital position. Because she does not replicate noir's technique of titled camera angles and unusual perspective, Nashaat falls short of the genre's requirements, however. And despite cinematographer Nizar Shaker's best efforts, the lighting (with the exception of the scene in which Noshi is killed -- an altogether dark, rather than contrasty approach) does not live up to expectations. The thing most readily taken against the film, however, is the way in which the ending is twisted in the name of unpredictability -- something that ultimately damages the plot. The abrupt shift in the position of Sahar's brother Fathi (Mahmoud Abdel-Moghni) -- at first he exerts himself in the service of Adham's cause, only to end up fighting him to the death on top of a train -- rings an illogical note. Nor is the incorporation of straight action scenes -- car chases, gun fights -- faithful to the spirit of a film that attempts to evoke noir. The director failed to supply those small details that would have helped the viewer avoid distraction. For example, in the gala dinner Adham walks away from his table and then returns to find a paper on his plate saying "you are wasting your time with Rasha" (Noshi's daughter, played by Riham Abdel-Ghafour) -- immediately the one is chasing the other. Yet the effect is lost as the viewer has not registered the fact that Adham saw Fathi place the paper on the table. Nostalgia for the noir led to much borrowing in the 1970s. Martin Scorsese used the genre's visual effects in Taxi Driver. So did Ridley Scott in Alien, which, though a science fiction film, capitalised on noir's visual techniques. Other directors launched a movement entitled Neo-Noir, one example of which is Curtis Hanson's LA Confidential. A mere nostalgia was not enough for Nashaat, however. She had to deconstruct and then reassemble the film using a plot strategy that made it teeter at the edge. In the end credit may well be due, for this is a film one step removed from the dominant commercial comedies. But it must be said that it adds nothing to serious cinema.
