Making joy, making magic

Amina Elbendary is enchanted with Radwan El-Kashef's new film
In a sunny roof-top scene in Al-Sahir (The Magician), Radwan El-Kashef's Eid release, the protagonist Mansour Bahgat asks his new neighbour, and new woman interest, Shawqiya, to the movies. "Have you ever been to the cinema?" he asks the divorcée. "No, never," she says, simply and without self-pity. "I always go when I'm feeling down," he explains, "and I come out lighter and happier."
This, in a nutshell, is El-Kashef's statement of intent.
Mansour Bahgat (played by Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz after several years away from the big screen) is a retired magician; he retired because stage-block meant he could no longer do traditional magic. But his tricks are not about the occult, not about pigeons and abracadabra. If magic is changing from one state to another, then Mansour "Bahgat" (literally "joy") is concerned with transforming people.
Mansour dresses up in an officer's uniform so that his friend the police informer can boast that a top police officer actually attended his daughter's wedding. A friend's son, a poor fisherman, is depressed -- impotence has led to insoluble marital problems, his young wife leaves him and goes home to her village. Mansour tries to work magic and prescribes potions but in vain. He finally talks the man out of his depression. He takes the neighbour's son, Hisham, who has Down's syndrome, to the movies.
How Mansour manages to earn a living is unclear: his main occupation in life is obviously making other people happier. His obsession, though, is guarding the honour (and more specifically virginity) of his teenage daughter, Nour (played by Menna Shalabi). It is a central theme in a film that opens with a nightmare: Mansour, dressed in magician's garb, is walking with his daughter down a deserted street at night when a group of thugs pull up, beat him up and abduct his daughter. She, though, is far from perturbed, and once in the car removes wig and coat, transforming herself from angelic daughter to brazen tart. Mansour wakes up in a panic.
The girl is growing up, her body developing contours perfectly emphasised by Nahed Nasrallah's costumes. She is rebellious, her mother is dead, there is no one to quell her. He takes her out of school and locks her up though she quickly manages to circumvent her captivity and secretly meets her boyfriend Hammouda (Sari El-Naggar) in the room on the roof. The young couple want to get married, but Mansour is initially against the idea; he doesn't like the boy's father, and the girl is still too young for marriage. They are both on the threshold of adulthood, living an adolescence charged with sexual frustrations, trying to sneak past their families and society to steal brief pleasures.
Shawqiya (Salwa Khattab) is also someone whose business in life is to make others happy. She works as a haffafa, a beautician, a woman who waxes and makes women up, especially brides -- an occupation charged with erotic overtones.
Her husband uses the fact that she has produced only one son as an excuse to take another wife, a wife Shawqiya is asked to make up for her wedding night. Unable to bear the humiliation, not to mention the vulgarity, of the new wife, Shawqiya gets a divorce and moves with her son to a room on the roof- top where Mansour Bahgat, Nour and Hisham live. She plans to kill her ex-husband and almost accomplishes the act before she is overtaken by Mansour, who once more comes to the rescue.
Mansour's real challenge, though, is to find a solution to the health problems of Shawqiya's son. Ali (played by Mahmoud Hisham) is on the verge of blindness. He has to leave school because he cannot keep up with his school mates. The condition is operable, but operations cost money. So money must be found.
This is secured by a complicated con trick involving a millionaire, his Westernized grandson Hazem, (played by Gamil Ratib and an infuriating Mika Thabet respectively) and an old work horse being passed off as an Arab stallion. But there are repercussions: Nour falls for the wealthy Hazem, they are followed to a nightclub by an hysterical Hammouda, with an equally hysterical Mansour in tow, and all hell breaks loose.
Typical of many films of the past decade Al-Sahir is about life on the margins and the fate of the marginalised. Yet unlike many of its sister movies it is a much gentler take on those blurred areas of existence. A lot of the action takes place on the roof top of a building in Old Cairo. Yet with Salah Marei's simple sets the roof, with a view of the Nile and healthy green plants, is not an oppressive marginal space. It is sunny, homey and safe. It accommodates Mansour's old magic-making equipment, including his pigeons, it has room for Nour and Hammouda's love affair, it accommodates Shawqiya after her divorce and witnesses her growing romance with Mansour. And it is finally in Shawqiya's room on the roof that Nour and Hammouda's engagement party takes place.
The characters exist on multiple margins and borders themselves, both spatial and psychological. Though they are all charged with sexual (and other) frustrations they manage to come out on top in the end. The most dramatic of these is, of course, Ali, on the verge of blindness, who can see and not see. Hisham, on the other hand, is forever stalled in his mental state. Scriptwriter Sami El-Siwi and El-Kashef should be credited for including this character, played brilliantly by Hisham Mashhour, so unobtrusively.
Hisham is easily accepted as part of the lives of the characters. But in a reflection of his own position on the margins he is often shown in doorways, peeping behind closed doors, sneaking in on the plot but unable to join he action. He, too, is in love with Nour, but unlike Hammouda he knows he can only watch. Taken along as a chaperon to the cinema, he sits one row behind them, and when they are finally united Hisham is glimpsed, through the window of the roof top room, an onlooker with tears in his eyes.
Mansour himself, a magician, lives on the margins of magic and reality, a fuzzy area typified by the cinema to which the characters repeatedly resort.
It takes Shawqiya's mediation to convince Mansour to accept the marriage. Ali gets his operation and regains his eyesight. Shawqiya and Mansour acknowledge the attraction between them and are shown walking down the street together holding Ali's hands. And everybody manages to emerge happier by the end of the film. Having walked into the Renaissance cinema with a somewhat heavy heart on an unusually quiet Saturday evening, this reviewer came out lighter at the end. Radwan El-Kashef has made joy. And that is magic.
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