Secrets and lies

Magdi Ahmed Ali's latest, controversial feature is a dissection of middle class morality, writes Hani Mustafa
The task of reporting on Magdi Ahmed Ali's Asrar Al-Banat (Girls' Secrets) -- released just over two weeks ago -- is complicated by the nature of the subject: it deals, after all, with the illegitimate pregnancy of a 16-year-old girl. And confronted by a topic that is inevitably controversial, the greatest temptation for any viewer is likely to turn the film, however involuntarily, into a platform for expressing his or her own opinions on the issue. In this sense it might be argued that films like Asrar Al-Banat help provide public and legitimate channels for the airing of otherwise unutterable social taboos and in opening up discussion they may lead to constructive dialogue. Yet however interesting such discussions of subject matter might be in their own right, they tend to overlook the film's status as a work of art.
Many believe that films tackling social issues have inherent problems. Critics are divided roughly into two camps: those who profess "moral" repulsion (or, correspondingly, promote such "morally suspect" works of art as anti-fundamentalist statements); and those who believe that a truly "postmodern" film must by default eschew social issues or, placing themselves at the opposite end of the scale, acknowledge these films as the belated media exploitation of such issues and nothing more.
Within this minefield Ali seems to purposely set the cat among the pigeons, having realised from past experience that the cinematic aspects of Asrar Al-Banat would be the least discussed. And indeed "moral" debates have reigned supreme since the film's well publicised release.
Asrar Al-Banat opens with the conversation of a middle-class family made up of a father (Ezzat Abu-Awf), a mother (Dalal Abdel-Aziz) and a little girl (Maya Shiha). Judging by the questions she asks and her curiosity about life, one can surmise that the daughter is precocious and intelligent. The family, on the other hand, is decidedly ordinary: Azza Shalabi's script and the film-maker's instructions to the actors both work to establish this fact as the parents fail to answer their daughter's questions.
In a flash the viewer is transported to the future: the girl has reached puberty; she is celebrating her cousin's birthday at her aunt's house; the aunt (Sawsan Badr) asks the mother to let her stay the night. In a few telling shots, Ali makes it clear that she is in a bad mood despite the celebratory atmosphere.
In the middle of the night the girl gets up to go to the bathroom; she is palpably in pain. The aunt (Sawsan Badr), awakened by her groans, gets up and follows her, asking if it is her period that is causing her to groan. The girl nods, but in a singularly shocking close-up the camera reveals first an expression of extreme pain on her face, then blood trickling down her bare, parted legs, then, suddenly, a newborn baby before her on the bathroom floor. Unprepared, the incredulous viewer realises that the girl was in pain because she was giving birth.
Thus Asrar Al-Banat begins with the conclusion, continually reverting to the premise. The flashback technique -- elsewhere a vapid subversion of chronology that can weaken structure and mess up the flow of information -- performs a cardinal function in Asrar Al-Banat. The violent tragedy that underlies the plot of the film, delineated linearly, would have proved both predictable and hackneyed. By presenting the viewer with an intense initial shock -- the moment that, dramatically, embodies the climax of the tragedy -- Ali manages to introduce an element of the unexpected and to regulate the unfolding of events in such a way as to avoid the louder melodramatic notes, concentrating on the psychological drama.
When the mother declares that she had known all along but couldn't bring herself to believe it, for example, the statement is followed with flashbacks, the past shedding light on the present on more than one level. Subsequently, at one point, we see the girl dumping a great number of sanitary towels in the rubbish. At another point, the mother questions her about "the towels I bought for you" but she manages to wriggle out of the interrogation. Considering that it is possible to conceive the first shot as a hypothetical figment of the mother's imagination, rather than an actual event from the past, one can only feel thankful for the flashback technique, without which the same episode would have had neither psychological depth -- the insight into the story as it unfolds in the mother's mind -- nor artistic ambiguity.
It is thus that the scene in which boy (Sherif Ramzi) meets girl and they do the deed is postponed almost until the end of the film -- perhaps to emphasise the fact that it was made not to sensationalise a possible moral fall but to seek out the roots of a possible family predicament. Material motives remain in the shade, while the social malaise that underlies the girl's story is thoroughly dissected: why and how might the circumstances of an ordinary family lead to such a tragedy; how does a precocious teenager come to be so estranged she must go into her room and shut the door behind her (as the mother retrospectively remarks). This genre of cinema comprises a slippery slope, for the topic of illicit pregnancy is old. Yet the present offering presents the story as lived experience rather than romantic or moralising rhetoric.
Nothing is perfect, though. Asrar Al-Banat does fall into the sensational trap towards the end: the fundamentalist doctor who, while operating on the girl after her aunt takes her to hospital, decides to circumcise her as punishment -- and the long lecture he is subsequently given by the aunt while they walk down a hospital passageway -- were both unduly melodramatic if mercifully brief. One recurrent motif -- the girl folding an ambiguous head-kerchief which, as it later turns out, she uses as a corset to hide her pregnancy -- seems to be borrowed from Henri Barakat's classic Al-Haram, in which Faten Hamama, a day labourer, employs the same trick with success. While the kerchief may have worked for a day labourer dressed in several layers of galabiya, for a middle-class girl dressed in tight Western-style clothes it is unlikely it would do the trick.
Shiha's outstanding performance notwithstanding, the film is overloaded with music. Yet Mohamed Fawzi's classic birthday song, Eid Al-Milad, a joyful and carefree tune that accompanies the more poignant part of the story, served as the perfect counterpoint to the grim melancholy of the action.
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