Romancing the past

Mohamed El-Assyouti finds pleasure in cinema's love of self-reference
With the evident decline of Egyptian cinema over the last decade, the annual crop of Eid films have come to offer few surprises. The birth of the shababi (youth) film has ushered in a new era of star-making, but little in the way of experiment. Even so, the film Rashah Gariaa (A Generous Gesture), stands out in virtue of its scriptwriter, Maher Awwad.
A pillar of the 1980s cinema, Awwad has kept a low profile amidst the helter-skelter that followed, but he is best known for his supposed failures. His most commercially disastrous films have all gone on to attain the accolades of film buffs. Of these, four marked the beginnings of director Sherif Arafa's career, and another brought us Said Hamed. The limp draw of Awwad's brilliant flops was largely due to their technological shortcomings, but also to the burden of a mislaid cast. The movies starred the usual mainstream cinema heavy-weights of the time, who simply failed to evoke the youthful energy of Awwad's scripts.
The shababi wave has been good to both Arafa and Hamed -- of top-grossing Sa'idi fil Gamaa Al-Amrikiya's (An Upper-Egyptian at the American University, 1998) fame -- and it seems that Awwad is finally catching up with Rashah Gariaa. The film is directed by Hamed and produced by Ashraf Abdel-Baqi, in an apparent attempt to redeem his wavering commercial appeal after the failure of Ashyak Wad fi Roxy (The Coolest Dude in Roxy) last year.
Depicting the struggle of two young actors trying to launch their career, Rashah Gariaa is a self-mocking parody studded with numerous allusions to Egyptian film classics and the contemporary filmmaking scene. The protagonists, Salmawi(Abdel-Baqi) and Mima(Yasmine Abdel-Aziz), stumble through a series of rites familiar to young talents trying to make a name for themselves. At one point the absurdist Arts Academy committee asks Mima to show how she would drown in foot-deep waters, thus revealing her legs for each of the four committee members to drool over. The two struggling artists then decide to try their luck in commercial theatre and take part in an play that includes lots of improvisation.
A number of well-timed plot twists take the pair from theatre, to police station and back to the theatre, where they manage to win laughs and the approval of an amused Arab in the audience. The star of this play, played by veteran actress Hala Fakhir -- who has starred in many a humiliating performances of this ilk herself -- is brushed aside by the unlikely patron. The brief spell of good fortune ends when an infuriated fundamentalist curses the play's antics. That night, the theatre is set afire by a street gang and Salmawi and Mima are hauled back to the police once again.
Youssri Nasrallah's Al-Madina (The City, 1999) also criticised the abject state of commercial theatre, but the point being made about this scandalously cheap entertainment in Rashah Gariaa has its own poignancy. Abdel-Baqi is himself a staple of commercial plays and the films Hamed has made for the past decade are the decadent cinematic equivalent. In this manner, Maher Awwad's script manages to utilise icons of a degraded art form as a self-parody, a paradox akin to Schwarzenegger replacing Laurence Olivier as Hamlet in the Hollywood child's fantasy The Last Action Hero (1993).
The story picks up with the introduction of the character Shawkat Halabi, an internationally renowned director with a penchant for presenting Shakespearean plays. Halabi is conducting auditions for a grandiose stage version of Othello, and he selects Salmawi, Mima and her ex-boyfriend Subaih from hundreds of actors. Salmawi and Subaih are made to dual for the lead role and, metaphorically, for Mima's affection.
The film skillfully weaves allusions to some of the most classic scenes of Egyptian cinema. Entering a film studio as extras, the characters are classified by assistant director Ali Idriss -- playing himself, but holding a whip and affecting an ill temper -- as either British soldiers or nationalists according to skull size. Salmawi and Mima play the parts of demonstrators during the 1919 Revolution -- an echo of a classic scene in Hassan El-Imam's version of Naguib Mahfouz's Bein Al-Qasrin (Palace Walk, 1964). However, losing the paper from which he was reading his protests and carried by the masses from the studio into the streets, Salmawi starts railing against poverty and hunger and sings the famous line from shaabi superstar Shaaban Abdel-Rehim about quitting smoking and working out. Again, the unlucky couple are arrested.
Upon release, they are granted a reward of LE10 and they stop at a supermarket to spend it -- a reference to a scene from Anwar Wagdi's Yasmine (1950). Moving still inside the classical cinema maze, Salmawi and Mima mistakenly enter the villa of actor Sami El-Adl, where Shaaban Abdel-Rehim is rehearsing a version of "Ashiq Al-Ruh" (Soul Lover) with a full orchestra and chorus. This ultimate tongue-in-cheek sequence brilliantly parodies the over-the-top scene of Wagdi's classic Ghazal Al-Banat (Wooing the Girls, 1949), where the legendary Mohamed Abdel-Wahab sings his famous song thus entitled. The parody eventually gives way to a mockery of contemporary music as Shaaban launches into his rap-like lyrics and the protagonists tour the streets in an open car.
Salmawi and Mima, implicated in the murder of the director Halabi, are again forced to run from the law. The sequence in which Hassan El-Asmar sings a modern mawaal (ballad) easily recalls the classic Hossameddin Mustafa film Adham El-Sharqawi (1964) where Abdel-Halim sings to the police chasing after the Robin Hood-like hero of the film's title.
The policeman who haunts the film in search of Salmawi and Mima himself recalls a similar character in Rafaat El-Mihi's Samak Laban Tamr Hindi (Hodge Podge, 1988) and serves as a reminder of the chaotic application of emergency law -- a recurrent motif in the film and a common sub-plot of modern Egyptian cinema.
The conclusion speeds to a self-conscious Hollywood-style happy ending. A villainously grinning director Hamed turns up posing as an unknown suspect while a newspaper vendor calls "read about the murder!" Ultimately, the true culprit is revealed and the fugitives vindicated. The finale has Salmawi and Mima cast as Othello and Desdemona and cheered by a wide audience, conveniently peopled with the likes of local cinema distribution magnate Mohamed Hassan Ramzi and producer Mohamed El-Adl -- two of the main players in the new star-making game -- as well as number one funny man Mohamed Heneidi, along with recently-risen comedy stars Hani Ramzi and Ahmed El-Saqqa.
If it all seems a little too contrived, two points stand out amidst this saccharine closing to an otherwise dark comedy. First, it takes place in an amphitheatre, as opposed to a movietheatre, thus stressing the interdependence between the world of cinema and that of theatre. Second, it knowingly points to the small circle of young rising stars as the future of Egyptian cinema -- it could be bleak, it could be a success. We can only assume that the trio of Awwad, Hamed and Abdel-Baqi are hoping for the latter.
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