At the screening of Dawoud Abdel-Sayed's long awaited new film, Hani Mustafa is disappointed awoud Abdel-Sayed belongs to a generation of filmmakers whose work is known as neo-realism. Theirs was significantly different from the work of the pioneers of realism like Salah Abu-Seif, Kamal Selim and Tawfik Saleh. The neo-realist filmmakers, whose films became increasingly available during the second half of the 1970s and who reached their zenith in the 1980s, had several aspects in common: traits that can be traced through the work, for example, of Khairi Bishara, Mohammed Khan and the late Atef El-Tayeb. These films revolved around the sharp and violent transformations that beset Egypt following the 6 October 1973 War, particularly President Sadat's Open-Door Policy, which altered the political and social status quo. These films were constrained by production costs, but this was not the main reason that many of the neo-realists departed the studios to streets, apartments, and other real-life locations. The principal drive, rather, was to be as close as possible to reality, and to showcase the human state of the Egyptian people across class in as naturalistic away as artistic dictates allowed. Thus it seemed as though political critique was the principal motivational element in neo-realism -- a fact exemplified by Al-Sa'alik (The Streetwise, 1985), Abdel-Sayed's debut. It was one of the first films to register the consequences of the Open-Door Policy, and the rise of a new class of nouveau riche businessmen. In this, his last film, Rasail Al-Bahr (Messages from the Sea), on the other hand -- as in several of his previous films -- Abdel-Sayed's script is closer to literature than to politics, whether in terms of drama or characters. This is no doubt aided and abetted by the narrator who recounts many events in the film through the character of the protagonist, Yahya (Asser Yassin): a young doctor whose obvious problem is a stutter. Abdel-Sayed tries to present a specific psychological state. Yahya leaves the villa where he has lived with his parents after his father dies and he no longer has any means of support; he has no desire to immigrate to America with his brother. Rather, he leaves all this behind and goes to Alexandria, where he lives in an apartment belonging to his parents and work as a fisherman. Abdel-Sayed seeks to communicate the feeling that Yahya, by leaving his aristocratic family to this new life as a fisherman in Alexandria, is undergoing some kind of rebirth. He is rediscovering himself and the life that surrounds him in a quasi-poetic and primitive way. Yet this detail turns the protagonist, in practise, from a kind and modest young man to something of a retard -- especially as regards his stutter, which underlines this impression without having any dramatic value. Among the least credible aspects of the script is that we are told Yahya graduated from medical school first-class -- something that could not possibly have happened in the light of medical school requiring oral and practical as well as written examinations; in fact a mere pass seems beyond Yahya's ability -- and this is further established by the fact that Yahya says he was often the butt of jokes by nurses and patients alike, so much so he never actually practised the profession. No doubt it was Abdel-Sayed's strong desire to present his philosophical ideas that led him to overlook this essential detail, yet there was no dramatic need for the protagonist to be a physician. Perhaps the only thing that drove Abdel-Sayed, who as usual wrote the story and the script, is the idea of choice: that he wanted to underline the idea that someone with a good job could choose to give that up for a new and apparently less rewarding kind of life. The script trails the protagonist around numerous places while he discovers a new world in Alexandria. Through these movements Abdel-Sayed seeks to present his own remarkable cast of characters. There is, for example, Qabil (Mohamed Lotfi), a well-built man with sharp features who works as a bouncer: Yahya makes his acquaintance at a bar, where drinking for the first time in his life he quickly becomes drunk. Qabil carries him to his own apartment on the roof of a typical building. Thus a strong friendship begins... Qabil seems to be the only character in the film with any human depth or contradiction; so much so that it requires a separate film in its own right. In the past he ended up killing a man and seriously injuring two others, which drove him to swear he would never beat anyone again despite the nature of his job. In one scene he describes himself as a scarecrow, ultimately harmless. And by revealing this secret to Yahya he consolidates their friendship. This dramatic line is further complicated when Qabil begins to experience seizures and it becomes apparent that he requires the surgical removal of a brain tumour -- an operation that could cost him his memory. This makes the Qabil subplot the most powerful from the human point of view, yet the script reduces it to one scene, perhaps the most beautiful in the entire film: Qabil sits down his girlfriend Bissa (Mai Kassab) and tells her the names and characteristics of all his friends and relations so that she can help him remember them after the operation. Abdel-Sayed tries to present as wide a cross section as possible of characters and types. Yahya's neighbour, the Italian lady, Francesca (Nabiha Lotfi), for example, who has known him a long time -- enough to present a sort of mother figure at certain points. Indeed Yahya and her daughter Carla had an adolescent love affair which did not go beyond a few kisses at the entrance to the house. This human contingent seems like an elegy for cosmopolitan Alexandria during the first half of the 20th century. Abdel-Sayed also spent a few minutes at the start of the film on displaying the aesthetics of belle-epoch architecture in Alexandria in an almost documentary style. Such nostalgia for some old, arguably nonexistent Alexandria controlled the mentality of the filmmaker. This is a somewhat hackneyed theme, all too often capitalised on in the arts -- the recent television serial drama Zizinia, written by Osama Anwar Okasha and directed by Ismail Abdel-Hafez, being one of the more obvious examples. Yet Abdel-Sayed shows himself to be a neo-realist to the core in his critique of consumerism -- an essential tenet of the movement. In Rasail Al-Bahr this is accomplished largely through the character of Hagg Hashem (Salah Abdallah), the new owner of the building where Yahya lives. He is the exhausted, extremely in-your-face stereotype of the evils of Open-Door Policy: his ambition is to demolish the beautiful, classical building in order to build -- a mall, the most predictable and garish symbol of consumerism. He is ready to do anything and pay any price to accomplish this ambition. Hagg Hashem's dialogue, in which he makes fun of Yahya's stutter and makes implicit threats of physical violence makes the character even more stereotypical. Even worse, the script turns this supermarket owner into a representation of pure evil: he owns fishing boats, for example, but uses dynamite to kill fish; he abuses religion (another aspect of Sadat's Open-Door society) in order to achieve material goals. The effect of this character and the incumbent subplot is to weaken the thrust of the film. Abdel-Sayed pays attention to the sensual side of Yahya's relationship with Nora (Basma), whom he meets on a rainy night in Alexandria, having made a habit of hanging out underneath the balcony of a beautiful villa where he hears piano -- he bumps into her on the way back (only at the end will Yahya discover that it is Nora who was playing all along). She introduces herself as a prostitute, but it turns out she is in fact the second wife of a rich businessman (Ahmad Kamal) who requires nothing of her but the occasional night he might be able to spend with her once he is able to get away from work back in Cairo. Nora really feels that she is paid for sex, the only difference being that she only has one customer. At one point the narration shifts from Yahya to Nora, which seems wholly unjustified, implying the start of a new film -- or rather that, unable to present her life through action, the filmmaker had to turn Nora too into a narrator in order to solve the narrative problem. Such romantic business seems to belong in an earlier age of Egyptian cinema, especially in the final scene when Nora and Yahya's relationship, thus far an up-and-down affair, finally stabilises and we see them together on a boat far out at sea, surrounded by fish that have been killed by Hagg Hashem's dynamite. This could have been the next best scene (after the scene in which Qabil dictates the names of friends and family to his girlfriend) but the graphic work weakened its visual effect. Besides which the somewhat sentimental title, Rasail Al-Bahr, seems neither logical nor justified in a largely disjunctive narrative framework. It has no reference apart from that message in a bottle carried by the waves before the opening credits, which is one of the most significant themes moving along lines parallel to the action. When it appears at the window of a fisherman and he throws it back into the water muttering prayers to protect him from the evil he assumes it contains (some kind of magic or hex), the message of the sea stimulates the viewer at the start. Though the same bottle reappears to Yahya, it remains an ineffectual and unclear mystery never explained by the events of the film. Only at the very end does Nora say to Yahya that this message might be a letter from a sailor to his family, a will, or a monk's prayer but the important thing is that it is a message from the sea to Yahya himself. A sentimental statement -- perhaps evocative in a certain way -- it nonetheless adds nothing and takes away quite a bit. Its absence would have kept the mystery intact. It remains to be said that the film looks good, demonstrating Abdel-Sayed's visual sense of beauty and establishing the photographer Ahmad El-Morsi as its premiere star. No doubt Abdel-Sayed is a strong director -- and he avoids the present faults in many films, most notably Al-Kitkat (1991) -- but he tends to pile up so much philosophy in his films that he ends up marring their drama, the most obvious examples being his 1991 Al-Bahth an Sayed Marzouq (Looking for Sayed Marzouk) and the 1999 Ard Al-Khawf (Land of Fear). Rasail Al-Bahr is no exception: as soon as there is a closeup on one character, that character begins to philosophise, as if Abdel-Sayed is simply desperate to voice his own philosophical ideas. he film was delayed for so many years not because I was preparing for it," filmmaker Dawoud Abdel-Sayed told Sarah Mourad, "but because the market wasn't producing the kind of film I make, so production money was not forthcoming. The script remained unchanged while I waited. Had Ahmad Zaki played the main role, as was planned at a certain time, the script would have been adjusted to suit him. Since he did not, no changes were made. Anyway I thought Asser Yassine fit the role very well, aside from the talent I sensed in him. That's why I chose him to play the part. "When I write a script, I think about everything at once: the characters, the sets, the incidents and events, and of course the meanings. But I never decide in advance how exactly I am going write something or on what to base it. Only a particular idea comes to into my head, so I start working on it. I think the thrust of the film, or the main part of it, is that idea that we should take life as it comes, for all it is, the sweet and the bitter. We should adapt to it and try to accomplish what we can to benefit ourselves and others. "Each director has their own style, but when a director also writes the script, that style becomes even more pronounced because all the ideas emanate from one person. I write most of my own scripts, but I am not against directing scripts by others -- if I find a script I like. I just can't do it the other way round: I can't write a script for someone else to direct. The only reason I write a script is to direct it, so I don't see myself writing one for someone else. "Egyptian remakes of foreign films lack creativity, I think; they are not authentic. There are now satellite television channels that pump money into the film industry by buying films, and once they stop -- it happened last year -- then there is a huge shortage in production money. But of course satellite TV money might just stop coming and then I don't know what will happen. I have many film projects, but nothing is ever certain until there is a source of funding for it."
