Dressed up autobiography

The heroines of Youssef Chahine's latest film are mirror images of the director's ego, suggests Mustafa Darwish
There is a cinema that facilitates progress and transformation, and cinema that contributes to social regress. From the paradigms and "messages" promulgated by films one can, roughly, gauge out that society's conditions and perhaps even its fate.
The Egyptian film industry (like much Arab culture) is informed by a singular notion of past glory lost among the contradictions of the present. Egyptian film has, as a result, remained an infertile and barren terrain. That the singularity of the notion has no backup in reality has not prevented Egyptian films from becoming increasingly boring and ineffectual.
That Egyptian cinema has never quite reached the stage where it is liberated from censorial binds is precisely because it is built on this narrow, one- dimensional foundation. By directing films that run a different course, a small battalion of home-grown auteurs, including Youssef Chahine, attempted to dismantle the foundation in question.
Yet most such attempts met with failure. There are many reasons for this, among which the skewing of the criteria by which such directors differ from the mainstream looms large. This is largely a consequence of their not having the benefit of an informed audience, properly exposed to world cinema, or a systematic epistemology of film capable of illuminating the various aspects of filmmaking. The result is that their vision winds up being egotistical and their logic warped.
Youssef Chahin
No film demonstrates this more clearly than Sukkout Hansawwar (Silence, We're Shooting), Chahine's latest release, and the most recent installment in a 50-year-long career that has resulted in 40 films.
Sukkout Hansawwar turns out to be not only a pained swan song but one of Chahine's most honest statements, however horribly the director may have blundered in casting some of his actors and instructing them to enunciate an already unconvincing dialogue in accents that remain utterly removed from the rhythms of normal speech.
There can be no doubt at all that the film's three main characters -- the grandmother (Magda El- Khatib), the mother (Latifa) and the daughter (Ruby) -- are all reflections of Chahine's own ego, their story a dramatisation of conflicts that take place only therein. These conflicts revolve around self-exploration and money-love while at the same time adopting an outdated, empty rhetoric about the endeavour to dissolve class barriers.
The grandmother is an old coquette, vastly rich and experienced in the ways of this world. Having had equal shares of misery and joy, she knows that life is but a moment of pleasure, however bittersweet that moment might ultimately prove to be. Now that she is approaching her end, she feels it is her duty to save her daughter and granddaughter from their own propensity for abiding by social traditions and repressive conventions that stifle the impulse to experience that moment of pleasure. She must spare them the brunt of an outdated morality that cost her the best of her own days.
The daughter, Malak, is a famous singer and film actress whose failed marriage is coming to an end as her husband and the father of her only daughter (Ahmed Mehrez), leaves her for another woman. In a state of isolation and frustration, she falls prey to the attentions of a gigolo (Ahmed Wafiq), ludicrously named Jean-Pierre Lam'i. For a long time she lets him share her cushy life and even to appear opposite her in a film, and though he is palpably (and not at all subtly) using her as a stepping stone she willingly accepts his humiliations, believing in him in spite of everything. This goes on until the Marivaudage comedy-within-the-film engineered by the singer's coworkers -- the director (Zaki Abdel-Wahab) and screenwriter (Ahmed Bedier) -- reaches its climax, exposing Lam'i. Malak finds out that, on hearing a rumour that the divorce has prompted the grandmother to leave all her money to her granddaughter, Lam'i has immediately transferred his attentions to Ruby.
As for the story of the granddaughter (symbol of the new generation), it is nothing more than a demonstration of how love and only love is capable of reconciling rich and poor. Since her early teens she has been in love with the son of her grandmother's chauffeur, now a left-leaning Masters candidate at Cairo University (Mustafa Shaaban). It is the grandmother who, in enthusiastically blessing their union, contributes the most to this theme. In one scene she invites her chauffeur (Mohamed El- Ednani) to a meal of nifa in a popular neighbourhood and asks for the hand of his son, a custom generally reserved for the parents of the bridegroom, not those of the bride; and the chauffeur, moreover, coyly resists the idea. Why does the grandmother do this? Because "no voice can be louder than the voice of love;" if they love each other, she insists, they must be united.
I will not describe this scene in detail, nor will I attempt a summary of the grandmother's conversation with the chauffeur. In fact I will refrain from commenting on the dialogue, from identifying faults inherent in the story and yet others in the way it was told. Rather, I will briefly consider two of the many problems with Sukkout Hansawwar, Chahine's superficial Pandora's box.
The first problem is that the meanings touched on by the film are not elucidated in any logical way; effects do not follow on causes and motives are seldom clear. This is why the film fails to induce in the viewer any sympathy for the various brands of suffering its characters undergo. Lam'i's change of heart, for example, makes no sense whatsoever: even if the daughter gets none of the grandmother's money, Malak would still be rich enough to support him; again, by virtue of her star status, it is Malak alone who can make him famous, offering him the chance to make his own money. The second problem simply concerns Chahine's choice of actors for the two young lead roles (Ahmed Wafiq and Ruby), a mistake that very nearly destroys the film's credibility.
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