Drugs? Don't do them or else they'll dig up your alleyway. Mohamed El-Assyouti disentangles a cinematic moral During the Eid it appeared that most teenagers were opting to see Qalb Gari' (Brave Heart), starring singer Mustafa Qamar, or else Kazalik fil Zamalek (Likewise in Zamalek), with Ramadan-TV star Hussein El- Imam. Parents, on the other hand, were arguing for Maali Al-Wazir (His Excellency the Minister), starring Ahmed Zaki, or so it seemed from the sometimes heated conversations to be overheard outside the box-offices of multiplexes. These, certainly, were the films that filled quickest, leaving late-comers to discover other releases by default. And to the surprise of many the one film with a non-star cast -- Khali Al-Dimagh Sahi (Keep Sober), written by Mona El- Sawi, directed by Mohamed Abu-Seif with Mustafa Shaaban, Sami El-Adl, Dalia Mustafa, Inaam Salousa, Caroleen Khalil and Khaled Saleh -- may not have been the most disappointing. With characters and situations strung together through the thinnest of plot-lines its return to the caricature style of 1940s- 1950s at least set it apart from its contemporary comedies. Every night, in a shanty neighbourhood four young men gather around a hash-loaded water pipe in a roof-top flat. When Mo'taman Effendi Sultan (El- Adl), a jinni who claims he is the son of the jinn's king of kings, smells their smoke he lands on earth and tries to solve their problems. Experiencing the contradictions of 21st century Cairo life, he ultimately realises that he has no power to cure the social and individual ills of his new-found friends and that it is about time people sobered up "before they take the Pyramids and transfer them over there". The jinni's concluding words refer us to two Egyptian films, made in the aftermath of the 1967 defeat. Hammam Al-Malatili (Al-Malatili Bath, 1973), directed by Salah Abu-Seif, the father of Khali Al- Dimagh Sahi's director, focuses on a poor villager, a prostitute and a bourgeois homosexual, and culminates in the prostitute's murder by a member of her family. The film, based on a story by Ismail Walieddin, blames poverty and the corruption of the bourgeois for the loss of Sinai; the finale features a village-idiot who yells at the passers-by "Wake up Egypt! Wake up Egypt!". Wa Quyidat Deidd Maghoul (Registered: The People Versus John Do, 1981) written and directed by Medhat El-Seba'i, revolves around the interrogation of a police guard accused of negligence on duty following the disappearance of the Great Pyramid. The film concludes with the closing of the case while the head of the police, spending the night with a belly dancer, receives a call reporting the disappearance of the Nile. The three films share an indictment of corruption and indifference which has left the Egyptian people prey to the external enemy. The essentialist socialist agenda of Khali Al-Dimagh Sahi is, like its predecessors, too reductionist for the message to emerge with any degree of subtlety: the result is that the fragile structure of the film collapses beneath its weight. The moral tale is told through clichéd characterisation and situations, a handful of stylised motifs, speech bubbles showing how Dalia Mustafa's character "loves the way Kamel's hair stinks of gasoline", steam coming from the top of Kamel's head when he is under the influence of the jinni, an animated cupid fluttering around during intimate moments, and Moodi El-Imam's patriotically self- important music. The stylistic paraphernalia are unable, though, to compensate for underdeveloped characterisation and a reliance on moribund stereotypes: the neurotic housewife who is either looking after the children or the household chores while neglecting the husband; the couple who cannot have sex because they live in one room with their children; the businessman who has three wives and pursues a younger fourth; the mother-in-law-to-be who resents the groom. That Mohamed Abu-Seif's finale should so clearly echo that found in one of his father's films should come as no surprise: he did, after all, resuscitate Al- Naama Wal-Tawous (The Ostrich and the Peacock, 2001), a controversial script his father had written 30 years ago, and the plotline of his debut film, Al- Tufaha wal Gumgoma (The Apple and the Skull, 1986), bore remarkable similarities to that of Al- Bedaya (The Beginning, 1986), made by his father. Seif junior seems happily intent to carry the torch for the kind of social realism, charged with criticism, that many identify with his father. One character in Khali Al-Dimagh Sahi is in love with a supermarket cashier and they cannot afford to get married. Standing in line to see her, he surveys the expensive products one customer is buying for his pet dog. Mona El-Sawi's script draws on other stock material. During Thanawiya Amma (general secondary school certificate) exams, parents wait outside with charlatans casting spells to aid the candidates, the invigilators sadistically remind the students that most of the questions are obligatory, while the students commit suicide by swallowing pills, shoot loaded pistol or hang themselves. Those who do not are later severely beaten by their parents as the school teachers announce into speakerphones that no one passed. In the alley where the main characters live there is a lake of drainage water over which pedestrians cross on makepiece bridges. When, through the jinni's intervention, the leakage finally gets fixed, the municipality immediately begins digging the ground up, once for telephone lines, another for water, and a third for electricity -- which brings to mind the opening remarks of the ever- stoned Anis "Wazir Al-Keif", protagonist of Tharthara Fawq Al-Nil (Chit Chat over the Nile, 1971) based on Naguib Mahfouz's novel. El-Sawi's script, then, certainly makes a stab at dissecting the relationship between ordinary people and the state. Those lacking privileges are invariably the object of suspicion of the "where did you get that from" variety. Coming into money becomes a crime for the poor, a perk for senior government officials. When the jinni grants Kamel a suitcase full of dollars and a palace in the middle of Tahrir square Kamel quickly falls foul of the law. And despite the jinni's intervention a senior official is saluted by officers as he arrives in the airport, his suitcases loaded with drugs. Such official attitudes, if partially indicted as a contributory cause for the misery in which the film's protagonists find themselves, pale in comparison to that other cause -- the protagonists' own drug habits being foregrounded as the real culprit in Khali Al-Dimagh Sahi's diagnosis of their behavioural ills. It is the characters' own escapist strategies that allows the authorities to abuse them, that traps them in a vicious circle of abject poverty and irresolution in which their one way of coping is to be dependent on whatever channels of escape the system legitimately, or illegitimately, provides. And while the condemnation of escapism and consumerism could be the base of a perfectly valid project, Khali Al-Dimagh Sahi is far too glib in its assumption of the moral highground, far too sanitised and puritanical in its approach, to disguise its essentially regressive discourse, however self-important the glitter in which it comes wrapped.
