Hani Mustafa looks at those films whose success at the box office was facilitated by last-minute references to the revolution Doubtless the general mood of moviegoers will change in response to developments in the region where they go to the movies. One aspect of this collective mood is that it is easily bored: films that are popular today may prove unpopular tomorrow. One chronic problem with the Egyptian film industry is that it is to this shifting mood of the box office, not to artistic value, that its purveyors pay attention. In many cases this works: they reap the harvest of a particular cash crop genre, as it were, until the no more of that genre can be grown. This was the case with the social realist cinema of the 1980s, and again with farcical comedy through the last decade -- a spring already all but dry. These days many producers and distributors assume that the box office will stand by the political mood more than any other: films that deal with revolution and transformation have been the focus of filmmakers' efforts since day one. Direct evidence to back this line of thinking was the remarkable rise in viewing rates of political talk shows and news programmes as opposed to any other televised material. This drove the two films currently being screened to include scenes of the 25 January Revolution and Maidan Al-Tahrir; yet in both cases the point of these scenes was simply publicity: they had absolutely no dramatic or structural value. Sometimes, indeed, they seemed incompatible with the logic of the film in question. The two films I mean are Sarkhat Namla (An Ant's Scream), written by Tareq Abdelgelil and directed by Samih Abdelaziz and Al-Fagoumi (the name the oppositional vernacular poet Ahmad Fouad Negm gives himself in his memoirs) written and directed by Essam El-Shamma'. Sarkhat Namla was a clear example of a film that simply bundled scenes of the revolution without the least dramatic integration. In fact the very structure of the film, in common with many recent cinematic critiques of a social-political nature, was geared towards a single idea previously expressed in many similar films: that the president in Egypt is unaware of the corruption from which the country suffers. The protagonists comprise a small group of ordinary citizens whose fight against corruption centres on the attempt to get through to the political leadership of the country. This cinematic approach to politics reflected a tendency of the ousted president to make a show of single-handedly resolving one or another serious issue once it comes to his attention, invariably after the damage had been done, in an attempt to garner some popularity as a final arbiter on the side of good. This argument finds support in the fact that film's initial title was "Help Us, Mr President" before it was changed to Sarkhat Namla at the last minute. This idea, inherent to the film, is in total contradiction with the principles of the revolution up to and including what the film shows of it at the end. We see Gouda El-Masry (Amr Abdelgelil), a child of the lower class of Cairo, following his work with a National Democratic Party MP (Hamdi Ahmad) who unjustly implicates him in numerous public funds issues, feels a huge sense of happiness when he first witnesses the sit-in at Maidan Al-Tahrir, saying, "At last the country has a people to show for itself." Yet instead of joining the ranks of the protesters, Gouda goes to the presidential palace to complain about the injustice he has suffered. The scene ends rather predictably when Gouda is killed while he breaks into the presidential procession. A conventional melodramatic scene: Gouda is crawling and struggling with fatal injuries in order to enter the president's vehicle only to discover that the president himself is not in it. Yet in stark contrast to such naiveté the revolution Gouda supposedly supports -- as we all know from first-hand experience -- called for Mubarak stepping down. The dramatic structure of the script, from the beginning of the film, relied on many comic sketches reflecting social and political issues that affected the lower classes more than others. The skill of the screenwriter in this context is that he turns issues of public concern into satirical material. Such issues include prepaid cards for gas and electricity and the marriage of working-class young women to rich Arabs from the Gulf (represented by Gouda's sister in law) as well as the issue of virginity as a precondition for marriage and the attempt to cover up the loss of virginity with a Chinese-made "portable hymen". One idea with which the screenwriter was not as successful at generating comedy was the former Prime Minister Ahmad Nazif's idea of distributing documents of entitlement to a share in Egypt's amenities. No doubt those sketches or gags were the principal element of the first half of the film, which allowed the actors to demonstrate their abilities (one notable example being Youssef Eid in the role of Gouda's brother in law). Yet much else about that first half was conventional and predictable by any standards, with Gouda facing arrest and even death in Iraq before and after the war; he returns to Cairo penniless to find that he has lost his wife and son. The narrative bifurcates with the story of Gouda's wife (who leaves the son with her brother and travels to work as a belly dancer in Turkey, soon to turn into a prostitute) and child (who is forced out of school by his uncle to work as a tuk-tuk driver). Perhaps the filmmakers thought the melodrama, the contrivance and cheap emotion and dependency on coincidence, would invest the screenplay with artistic depth; all it did was spoil the comedy of the first part of the film. The second part was cheap pandering to revolution. *** Al-Fagoumi too was filmed in its entirety prior to the revolution; a few shots of Tahrir were added showing the 18-day sit-in or the Friday demonstrations following the fall of Mubarak; in this way perhaps the producer hoped to raise the political value of the film to make it more of a box-office hit. The producer certainly benefited from the claim that Al-Fagoumi is the first film to talk about the glorious 25 January Revolution. The screenplay is based on Negm's book of the first half of the 1990s, in which he talks about his own life -- his relationships and jobs and conflicts with the powers that be -- starting from the end of the 1950s. No doubt the subject matter was in itself an incentive to Shamma', Negm (played here by Khalid El-Sawi) being one of the most important figures in grassroots and popular culture during the second half of the 20th century. Yet at the start of the film I was taken aback by several inexplicable details. The name of Negm, for one thing, was changed to Adham Fouad Nasr -- an entirely inexplicable intervention on the part of the filmmaker, considering that the film and the book are eponymous. This strange and pointless twist will perhaps distract viewers from its many faults, since telling who is who will in itself take up some of their time and a lot of their attention. Negm's long-standing companion and collaborator Sheikh Imam Eissa, for example, becomes Sheikh Hammam (Salah Abdallah), while the well-known writer Safinaz Kazim, one of Negm's wives, becomes Mahitab (Kinda Alloush), and the well- known singer Azza Balba' -- another -- Menna Murad (Farah Youssef). I can imagine the degree of difficulty facing the screenwriter who takes on the task of telling the life story of the great poet audiovisually, basing his endeavours on a deeply engaging book written in remarkably flowing colloquial Arabic and mixing narrative with verse. Yet the writer writing about himself, in full control of his abilities, can mix and match reality and imagination, adjusting tone and emotion as required. The book is an intensive dose of anecdotes, memories and commentary on the poet's own community and Egyptian society at large, and it deals with historical events and biographical detail through an intimate and creative retelling of the poet's own first-hand experience of political as well as social reality. It was in the 1970s, under Sadat, that Negm came into his own -- in the company of Sheikh Imam -- an era during which oppositional, socialist or more precisely anti- capitalist and anti-Islamist ideology controlled much cultural activity. Yet the screenwriter saw only the political aspect of the book; he was unable to communicate the essence of the text, resulting in the protagonist coming across as a superficial heroic stereotype. The film presents only the political events that coincided with Negm's poems and songs, while the human and literary dimensions of the book are more or less entirely lost. The film omits the human aspect of the protagonist, his ability to invent and reinvent himself with humour. More precisely, it omits Negm's capacity to expose himself, failing to expose him in any alternative way. Yet the poet's ability to cheat some high-brow of what money he needs for kebab or hashish is an essential side of his character; and Negm himself was perceptive enough not to shy away from revealing it in the book. He could do so by sticking with the pleasure of the narrative, paying no attention to any possible preconception or prejudice. The filmmaker does not develop his own perspective on Negm's life story. He only intervenes in one respect, replacing the original recordings of the Negm-Imam songs, which would have given the film at least a nostalgic value, with new remixes that prove to be very weak by comparison despite the young singer Ahmad Saad's vocal abilities. Except for linking each song selected with the political event associated with it, there is no dramatic structure to speak of either. There is much pretension about the acting and the directing as well, with the scene in which Nisr in the prison cell reciting Negm's famous 1972 poem to Sheikh Hammam on his return from being interrogated, for example, reducing to very bad amateur experimental theatre.
