The Egyptianisation of Blanche Dubois

Eid time is cinema time. Nur Elmessiri joins the throng
Whoever she was, Blanche Dubois -- of Tennessee William's play A Streetcar Named Desire on which is based Ali Badrakhan's film Al-Raghba (Desire), released last week -- did not hang around her sister's and brother-in-law's living room in a black negligée. Scarlet the colour of her house robe could not have been. Burst from skin tight synthetic garments her breasts never did. She was not called Blanche for nothing.
For the viewer who has even a vague recollection of a casual one-time long-ago read of the play, or, second-hand, of the Elia Kazan film starring Vivien Leigh, the casting of Nadia El-Guindi as an Egyptian Blanche Dubois equivalent might be difficult to stomach. El-Guindi, after all, has for decades, film after film, worked very hard on creating and maintaining what has become an unmistakable Guindi screen sexual persona: tough, predatory, hard-edged yet oozing with carnality, she has taken the term femme fatale to interesting literal heights.
Forget the Williams -- and the Kazan. Forget the emotionally fragile bruised flower of a southern belle clinging to her fine airs. Badrakhan's film is, after all, an adaptation. Very few viewers of Al- Raghba will have seen the Kazan film (and, hence, very few will be able to recognise how the former in some parts follows the latter shot-by-shot, line- by-line). Certainly, most Egyptian cinema-goers will have never heard of, let alone read, the Tennessee Williams play.
So, to the protagonist of the film currently showing in the cinemas. Dressed to kill, Neimat El- Shabrawi, after a three-year estrangement, descends upon her cheerful, sensible sister Laila (played with feeling by Elham Shahine) and hunky brother-in-law (Yasser Galal) who live in a small flat in a seaside working class area of Alexandria, intending to spend an indefinite period of time with them. Lonely, single, alcoholic, and -- despite the paraphernalia of glamour and wealth packed neatly in her two suitcases -- penniless, she has come from Mansoura, the family ezba (land) and saraya (manor) having failed to deliver a life of financial security. Although Laila is happily expecting her first child, has forgiven her older sister who, together with their late mother, had snootily turned away Laila's boorish, working- class intended whom Laila nonetheless went on to marry, Neimat still takes issue with the marriage.
Neimat might be a social snob, disdainful of her sister's husband, but she is also a lonely, single woman who thrives on being complimented on how good she looks. So far, so Blanche -- at least in terms of script. Yet it takes a major suspension of visual disbelief on the part of the viewer confronted by Nadia El- Guindi, dressed and made up in Guindi-style, for Neimat to cohere as a refined character of nuance. Incredible though it may seem to the eye, the unfolding scenario and script try to tell the viewer, Neimat is a complex character. Lines pay lip service to a notion of sexual squeamishness on the part of the protagonist ("You men are pigs; you don't understand fine sentiments") -- sometimes delivered convincingly by El-Guindi who, surprisingly did manage to muster up a few truly moving Blanchean moments. Yet Neimat comes across as, above all, a woman of strong sexual appetite unfed. Refined women do not, as Neimat does, tart themselves up for a casual beach outing. When flirting, they certainly do not lick their lips. A smattering of French cannot be the only feature distinguishing them from their shaabi sisters.
Shaabi Alexandria? When? Where? Stella, scotch and poker may once upon a time have been Egyptian working- class forms of entertainment -- but in such copious quantities? The set -- mostly indoors, Laila's flat of multi-coloured walls -- was beautifully staged, but it lacked the kind of social and historical detail that would make Neimat's fall more palpable. Time may pass; classes might rise and then fall -- but Guindi as Neimat will neither bloom nor wilt. Her preoccupation with bathing (in true Blanche style) does not make as much sense as it would have had dirt been allowed on the set, had some hint of the sordid been allowed to menace the screen.
Which is not to say that Al-Raghba eschewed the sharp polarisations -- high class/low class, brutish physicality/ nostalgic gentility -- that such a plot could give rise to in favour of a more nuanced presentation of Neimat's psychic undoing. As the plot's emotional menage-a-trois thickens in the cramped Alexandria flat (which, so cramped, allows not-so-genteel Ms Shabrawi to flaunt quite a bit of gratuitous flesh), the potentially fertile ambivalences of the film were abandoned for less murky depths of human tragedy.
Nothing -- not even the ghosts in Neimat's far from clean cupboard -- is left tantalisingly mysterious. In flashback, an impoverished, broken down, alcoholic Neimat, now resident of the not- so-subtly named Red Flower Pension, is being led to the hotel room by a man who will pay for her scotch. In case the implications of such a scene are too ambiguous, too taxing on the viewer's intelligence, the camera takes us inside the room. It is not enough that, in one of the final scenes, Neimat's violent brother-in-law, in the house alone with a drunk Neimat in evening dress, carry her, having prised from her grip a broken Stella bottle, and enter the matrimonial bedroom. We have to be shown the ravishing (is she being raped?) scene.
On the one hand, the script by Rafiq El-Sabban (like the Williams' play) is concerned with a complex (class) sensibility, and not merely about frustrated libido. But it seems that the makers of this film felt that for A Streetcar to travel successfully across cultures (from 1940s America to Egypt 2002), for the script to be comprehended by the Egyptian audience, nothing -- least of all sexual desire -- should be left to the imagination. Nudity and sex, so it would seem, are needed if Tennessee Williams is to be adapted for the Egyptian screen.
That said and done, the production values of the film were polished, Elham Shahine's performance was strong. Somehow, together with the story itself (the play, the script), she carried the film through and made something like a sense of compassion for her older sister possible for members of the cinema audience. Some even shed tears.
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