Youssef Rakha considers Hani Ramzi's latest lead role on screen Of the handful of young comedians who first came to the notice of the public in the mid- 1990s Hani Ramzi has (for better or for worse, it all depends on your point of view) been, by a wide margin, by far the most consistent. While the stars of Mohamed Heneidi and Alaa Waleieddin rose with relative speed to the starry firmament, quickly outshining the rest and implying, one must hope, major developments in terms of both their style of performance and the kind of projects they take on board, neither the unique brand of clownishness in which Ramzi specialises nor the range and context of his ambition appear to have undergone much development in the last 10 years or so. Heneidi and Waleieddin initially depended on their unpropitious anatomy and, on going solo, quickly latched onto El-Adl Group and filmmaker Sherif Arafa, respectively. Ramzi, by contrast, continued to play up and readjust the persona on which his performances depended, embarking on work wherever he was to find it. "I refuse to subscribe to the clique phenomenon," he declared in a recent interview. "I look for a good script irrespective of its author's name... I think my popularity is very largely due to avoiding the take-away film trend..." Whether Muhami Khul' (Khul' Lawyer), written by the scriptwriter-turned-producer Wahid Hamed, directed by Mohamed Yassin, and produced by the Arab Company for Production and Distribution, avoids the junk food category is open to question. As Ramzi's first cinematic vehicle, it differs appreciably from such relatively recent offerings as Heneidi's Hammam fi Amsterdam (Hammam in Amsterdam) and Waleieddin's Al-Nazer (The Principal) in that it boasts many more points of interest than the mere presence of a not particularly perfectly formed individual -- well, certainly not someone who would be advertising Calvin Klein underwear in the international style magazines -- around whose nonetheless admirable qualities every dramatic element revolves. There is, for one thing, the topical theme; an interesting innovation in the arena of new wave (can we really call it new wave?) comedy: in its own lopsided way the film tackles the recently introduced khul' law, which enables a wife to divorce her husband. There is Dalia El-Beheiri, the eminently attractive "new face" who acts opposite Ramzi; as Rasha El-Wardani, her own khul' case forms the basis of the whole drama. There is Ula Ghanem, a television icon in the making who insists that Muhami Khul' has placed her at the foot of the road to stardom, some five years into her so far successful acting career. Then there are the subsidiary themes, which provide the action with much of its substance: the predictable, given the subject, taming-of- the-shrew aspect of the short-lived love affair of the two leads (Ramzi and Ghanem), a one-sided love affair, a sense of the clash of mentalities with which Egyptian society is increasingly beset, and an implied critique of the emergence of a class of filthy rich, superficially Westernised and ruthlessly self-interested 21st-century Egyptian women, represented by Rasha El- Wardani. Without delving too deeply into the necessary disciplines of character building, dramatic structure or subject research, Hamed's script manages to sustain a tightly wrought plot that proves more or less consistently entertaining as well as occasionally funny. The film is set in the office of a solicitor, Fouad Askar (Wahid Hamed), where the son of a provincial mayor, Badr El-Nousani (Ramzi) and a young aspiring lawyer who happens to be in love with him, Maha Alameddin (Ghanem), have started practicing. Many comically spectacular scenes take place in El-Nousani's birthplace, where his father (Hassan Hosni) and mother (In'am Salousa) command the respect -- for which read subservience -- of hordes of poor and for some reason particularly noisy villagers. Rasha El-Wardani arrives at the office wanting to divorce her husband, the forbiddingly over developed owner of a body-building gymnasium. Askar refers her to Badr and Maha, who on investigating the case find out that the reason she wants to divorce him after three months of marriage is that he snores. This is deemed insufficient, and the two young practitioners pursue the issue further. Does he beat you? No. Is he very stingy? No. And so on. Finally Maha is confronted with the question, "Can he...?" She had had no experience prior to being married to him, she explains. "But when we do it, it feels as if there is an earthquake in the room." Snoring is nonetheless legally construed as sexual impotence, since this is the only chance they have of winning the case; the husband's violent reaction notwithstanding, a kind of love affair develops between Badr and Rasha, interspersed with Maha's variously doomed attempts to draw Badr's attention to herself. So far so good, if somewhat convoluted. The action quickly deteriorates into a series of nonsensical manoeuvres whereby the courts rule in favour of Rasha, not because the husband "cannot" but because he operates at 64 rpm horsepower while Rasha herself is incapable of anything greater than 0.5 rpm. Following their legal triumph the husband turns into a bearded recluse while Badr and Rasha attempt to take their budding love affair further. Perhaps the most hilarious scenes are those that depict Rasha's arrival in the village, where she is to be introduced as Badr's fiancée. In order for the marriage to be approved the mayor insists that the wife-to-be visit the village and spend three days among its people for it is only then he deduces in his wisdom, that they will be able to determine whether or not she will become a suitable wife. The grand reception that the couple receives, however, pales in comparison to the villagers' reaction to seeing Rasha take a dip in the river in her bikini (conveniently enough the mayor's house, where she stays, overlooks the Nile). They gather, they gawk, they shriek. Badr and his father are paralysed with embarrassment and only Maha (who happens to arrive, modestly dressed, at the right moment) saves the day. She announces that she, not the woman in the river, is Badr's fiancée; the woman, they hasten to explain, is merely a businesswoman who has accompanied Badr to the village to investigate the possibility of investing a sum of money in some rural enterprise or other. Thus Rasha fails the mayor's test. And this brings the love affair to an abrupt and surprisingly easy close when Rasha, in an ironically romantic scene with Badr, concludes, "Let's think of it as one of the dreams of our lives." Hamed cleverly eschews the happy-ending formula, however, when, rather than finally realising and confessing his love for Maha, Badr openly tells her that he is not and will never be interested in her as a potential partner. The ending is then invested with an added sense of irony when, on coming out of court, Badr is accosted by two bodyguards not unlike those who accompany Rasha, only to be taken to a similarly rich and attractive woman (Hanan Turk) who seems to require his services (intimate as well as professional) in the process of divorcing her husband. Drawing on comedy to portray his point, Hamed seems to say that khul' is more about already liberated, fully empowered women, being frivolous and immoral as well as abusing their social status than about the justified liberation of the oppressed Egyptian wife -- a reactionary point if ever one was made, though one that has already been made, and continues to be endlessly reiterated in public discourse on the issue. In the aforementioned interview Ramzi -- conceding that it is "Ustaz Wahid Hamed" rather than he, who exercised the greatest force in the conception of the film -- describes Muhami Khul' as "a return to social comedy". Hamed had explained to him, he recounts, that the script emerged out of a concern with the fact that recent comedies all too often, in concentrating on inducing laughter above all else, end up by insulting the intelligence of the audiences they are supposed to attract. While this film does not fall hook, line and sinker in that particular trap -- the nonsense is, after all, purposely irrational -- suspension of disbelief is possible because, rather than being a direct depiction of reality, the film is presented as a fairy tale or fable, almost, utilised as a comment on its subjects; and the characters are, within the confines of this imaginative setup, not only entertaining but convincing -- Muhami Khul' is not as interesting an intellectual statement as one might be led to believe from these statements. It is, rather, a topical farce that makes excellent dramatic use of Hani Ramzi's natural abilities. Take it at face value, forget the surrounding hype -- it is, after all, the kind of cosmetic application that would have been better left in the bag -- and you're almost certain to squeeze out a couple of laughs at least.
