Stock characters, happy endings, a plot: Hani Mustafa finds conventions refreshing There is no logical basis for the making of comparisons between the films of Adel Imam and the current crop of new wave comedies that dominate the cinema screens. The latter products rely, in the end, on little beyond word play to extract laughter: Imam, on the other hand, has always been an actor as well as a comedian and his films, as a consequence, carry the possibility of dramatic development. They can rely on plot and characterisation in addition to badinage. Imam began his career as a comic actor and Aris min Giha Amniya (Groom from Security) sees him make a welcome return as such in a film that escapes the seeming straight-jacket of current comedy writing -- verbal joke after verbal joke after verbal joke -- to explore the dramatic potential of comedy, taking in, along the way, the possibility of constructing an intelligent satire. Director Ali Idris, and scriptwriter Youssef Maati, seem from the outset determined to play to the strengths of their star. Imam plays Khatab Naggari, over-protective father of Habiba -- played by Hala Shiha. So over-protective is he that no one is allowed to even look at his daughter. It is an obsessive pattern that is early established: in one of the film's opening scenes father and daughter are playing tennis together when a young man looks at Habiba. Her father immediately sends a tennis ball straight into the young man's face. Leaving the club together Naggari again catches a man casting an admiring glance at his daughter. He stops the car, gets out, and begins a fight. The traffic grinds to a halt. The fight continues, drawing in ever more bystanders as the camera pans out to show street after street clogged with traffic. Naggari's over-protection of his daughter has brought the city to a standstill. Idris then cuts to two drivers in adjacent cars talking about the gridlock, and agreeing that the president must be passing through town. That the plot includes Naggari's meeting with three of Habiba's potential fiancés allows a great deal of space for Imam's impersonation of growing hysteria. The first groom (Ashraf Abdel-Baqi) approaches Naggari in his bazaar and introduces himself as an employee of an oil company who earns $3,000 a month. Naggari smiles and explains the rules of Russian roulette while placing a single bullet in the barrel of a revolver. And before the game is over the potential groom has confessed that he works not in a multinational oil company but one that distributes butagas cylinders. The second groom (Ahmed Zaher) is a spoiled mummy's boy who is asked by his potential father-in-law to undress and then promptly denounced as "unfit" while the third, pop singer Rico, dances into Naggari's shop dressed in a track suit with a walkman. Naggari slaps him when he is told that his daughter would be Rico's perfect partner in duets, and the singer promptly dances out of the bazaar. The film does attempt some explanation for the attitudes of the father: his bazaar, which sells faux antiques, brings him into contact with tourists, with whom he conducts a great many affairs, and which allows the scriptwriter a field day when it comes to innuendo. And it is in the course of one of these affairs, with an Indian tourist whom Naggari is romancing by the Pyramids, that he meets Tarek, played by Sherif Mounir, the "groom from a security agency" of the title. Arrested on his amorous Pyramids outing, it is Tarek who intervenes to have the hapless Naggari released. Not that this act elicits gratitude: Tarek is, through his interest in Habiba, inevitably damned in Naggari's eyes. First the shop owner attempts to discredit Tarek on financial grounds, demanding a cheque for LE250,000 to secure his daughter's future should she demand a divorce, only to discover that Tarek is in possession of a vast fortune. He then insists that he will only allow his daughter to marry a man who is highly educated. And guess what? Tarek has a PhD from Cambridge. Finally Naggari stoops to having Tarek followed. When he is photographed (with a mobile phone) in a nightclub with a foreign woman, Naggari thinks he has all the evidence he needs. But no, it turns out that the estimable Tarek is on an undercover job, and the girl is part of a ring of foreign spies he is about to uncover. The relationship between Naggari and Tarek's mother, Inshirah, played by Libliba, offers a parallel situation comedy that includes the two engaging in a fist fight on the beach during their children's honeymoon. But as is the way in romantic comedy, from unlikely beginnings love grows. Aris min Giha Amniya ends with the marriage of Inshirah and Naggari following the birth of their granddaughter. It may be formulaic and hold few surprises -- certainly not to an audience familiar with Imam's 25-year career -- but this vehicle at least pays lip service to the importance of coherence. Who could have imagined that sitcoms -- given the kind of comedy that has monopolised the screens for five years now -- would suddenly look cutting edge?
