Rules of engagement

That's entertainment, and it's hardly challenging, writes Mohamed El-Assyouti
Exactly who is the audience? It is a question over which most filmmakers -- particularly those on the distributor-producer side of the equation -- must puzzle.
With so many recently opened cinemas the typical audience increasingly comprises the buyers of LE20-25 tickets rather than the LE3- 5 tickets that were so prevalent in what seems only yesterday. Today's Egyptian cinema, then, must perforce cater to the upper middle class rather than the working class adolescent. And as a consequence the content of mainstream films has changed to appeal to the new ticket buyers targeted during the summer school break.
Tareq El-Erian's Al-Sillim wal-Thu'ban (Snakes and Ladders) -- he provided the story, co-wrote (with Mohamed Hefzi), produced and directed the film -- is tailored to this new audience, an audience exposed to Western culture mainly through Hollywood cinema.
Al-Sillim's plot is a simple love story, common to many American films though with the imposition of details and the nuances pertinent to the local scene. The plot twists are predictable enough, based on the hoary formula that young men just want to fool around while young women want to get married. Hazim, the 27-year-old protagonist, is a creative director in an advertising agency, has a well-off father, a friendly ex-wife and a four-year-old daughter. He meets Yasmine, a car salesperson and a Tango coach, at a party, and determines to bed her. The object of the game is to avoid the pitfalls embodied by the snake, and rather concentrate on clambering up the ladders.
Hazim's existential dilemma, and the film's central problem, is whether or not to abandon promiscuity -- even temporarily -- in pursuit of the love relationship that he feels is necessary at this particular point in time.
The thoughts and feelings of these characters, though, have to be expressed as transparently as in a commercial stage or TV-drama: gulping Coca Cola, munching on popcorn, the audience demands the film's points be made crisp and clear. Hence, Ahmed and Amina, Hazim and Yasmine's best friends and confidantes respectively, act in most scenes to amplify the protagonists' inner thoughts to the kind of decibel levels necessary to penetrate the audience.
Modelling itself upon the male-dominated discourse of mainstream Hollywood, written and filmed by male filmmakers and addressed primarily to the children in a patriarchal society, Al-Sillim wal-Thu'ban empathises with Hazim and Ahmed. Yasmine's character, though potentially multi-dimensional, is often reduced into a mere shadow of that of Hazim, her actions mere reactions to the initiatives of her wooing male counterpart. But Al-Sillim wal-Thu'ban is an entertainment product, so no one should be surprised by its reinforcement of dominant gender roles, nor by its rampant product placement. US trained El- Eryan, an established director of advertisements, music videos as well as films -- Al-Sillim wal-Thu'ban is his third -- successfully plants brand names in both the dialogue and the visuals: this is a world the perimeters of which are described by Marlboro, Coca Cola, Sakkara beer, T G I Friday's, Hardee's, KFC, Pizza Hut, Baskin Robbins et al.
Catchy phrases of dialogue serve as selling lines for these brands. Almost every other scene contains a wisecrack or bawdy remark from, naturally, one of the male characters. The protagonists' first sexual encounter is discussed in football terms: attack, defence, scoring a goal, a deflated ball.
The commodification of the female body is part and parcel of the consumerism that the film both represents and promotes. At its best, though, Al-Sillim wal- Thu'ban is a light-hearted, sporadically sincere work of entertainment that plays everything by the book. There are moments of suspense, laughter, hope, hearts, sex and violence and a happy end. Barring nudity -- a taboo in Egyptian cinema yet to be broached -- it contains all the ingredients executive producer Griffin Mill demands to "market a film successfully" in Robert Altman's The Player.
If the branding is recognisable to the film's target audience, it is less likely to appeal to the wider group for whom such things remain purely aspirational. So what if Ahmed needs to repay a bank loan of LE42,000 incurred by his late father. His basic salary is LE3,000 a month, without commission. And his generous boss seems ever ready to advance loans. The millions of unemployed or underpaid people from the same age- group as the target audience have no room in the world of this film.
On a technical level El- Eryan's steady-cam and flying crane, and his recurrent resort to wide-angle lenses, especially when emphasising the solitary nature of the protagonist, result in a fine looking piece of entertainment. The director's decisions directly impact on the development of the narrative, a rarity in the artistically-impoverished local cinema, though the special effects in the virtual reality seduction scene failed in comparison to the visual quality of the rest of the film.
The connection with Michael Curtis's Casablanca -- shots from the "Play It Again Sam" sequence are included-- is flimsy: the loving and leaving episode in Al-Sillim wal- Thu'ban is radically and unfavourably at odds with the original. And while the Bogart- Bergman pairing continues to charm filmgoers, Hani Salama and Hala Shiha hardly stand up to the comparison, turning in performances that might have been more appropriate in a music video. The Godfather sequence playing in the background of one scene is another unfortunate allusion to classic cinema.
Superb cinematography (Sameh Selim) though, acts to salvage many scenes. The tango scenes, though, remain beyond redemption. The narrative function -- tango lessons being the device Hazim employs to bring him closer to Yasmine -- might profitably have been substituted by an activity at which both actors were more proficient. Table tennis, say.
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