Tracing the history of the Egyptian espionage film, Hani Mustafa finds fault with its latest incarnation Throughout the history of cinema and film in Egypt, the detective-espionage genre has always been popular -- no doubt at least in part because such films rely for their subject matter on the historical conflict between Egypt and Israel since the latter was declared a state in 1948. And especially since the 1967 War, the constant desire to defeat Israel in this conflict makes it easy for the viewer to identify with the action in such films and television series, driven by the urge to vanquish the enemy. This is demonstrated by the fact that the two espionage-based television series directed by Yahya El-Alami, Dumu' fi 'uyoun waqiha (The Tears of Insolence) starring Adel Imam and Ra'fat El-Haggan starring Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz continue to enjoy the highest viewing rates not only in Egypt but throughout the Arab world to this day, so many years after they were first aired in the early 1980s. Likewise Kamal El-Sheikh's Al-Su'oud ila al hawiyah (Ascending to the Abyss, 1979), perhaps the most important espionage film in the history of Egyptian cinema: it too proved incredibly popular. The espionage genre is a subcategory of suspense, which depends on powerful dramatic structure and a gripping plot. Yet in many cases it also edges closer to the action movie. This may seem like a moot point but the difference between suspense and action is not in fact negligible: the first relies on exercising the mind, narrating events in the context of tightly constructed storyline, while the second depends rather on the chase, the explosion, the murder, the battle, forgoing much drama in the process. It is probable that the kind of film in which espionage and action coalesce into their own sub-genre first started with the James Bond series, whose stories were written by Ian Flemming. Beginning with Terence Young's Dr No (1962), starring the celebrated British actor Sean Connery, this genre proved extremely popular with audiences worldwide. It may well be that the promise held by this mix of suspense and action is what tempted director Sherif Arafa to make Welad Al-Amm (Cousins) -- currently on show. Like the present film, the television series Ra'fat El-Haggan was based on a novel by the late Saleh Morsi inspired by Egyptian intelligence archives; and it had the subtitle "I Was A Spy In Israel". And the drama of the series revolved in its entirety around this idea. Welad Al-Amm, at least at the outset, is based on a similar idea. It opens with an Egyptian family made up of the father, Ezzat (Sherif Mounir), the mother, Salwa (Mona Zaki), and their two children: Sarah and Youssef. They are in the port city of Port Said getting ready for a journey across the Mediterranean; not until they are at sea and beyond the possibility of return does Ezzat inform his wife of the truth: that he is in fact a Mossad agent named Daniel. The next thing we know -- Salwa wakes up in Tel Aviv together with her family, having been drugged on the way there by Daniel. This dramatic line extends through the ways in which Daniel seeks to force his wife to accept reality and his attempt to convert his children to Judaism. But along parallel tracks, the script pushes forward another dramatic line concerning a young man named Mustafa. At the beginning the viewer supposes that that Mustafa (Karim Abdel-Aziz) is a radio anchor in Cairo's Hebrew service, yet in a subsequent scene it becomes clear that he is in fact an Egyptian intelligence agent who is fluent in Hebrew. A somewhat weak twist, this: it is hardly believable given the number of Egyptians who are fluent in Hebrew for an intelligence agent to work in the radio. One major challenge of script writing is the communication of information central to the story that may not be immediately apparent within the drama itself. This aspect of filmmaking is necessary for effective continuity, and it is achieved either visually, through sheer accumulation of the action, or directly in the dialogue itself. Screenwriter Amr Samir Atif makes use of scenes set in the meeting room of the Mukhabarat to impart much information crucial to the dramatic development of the film, using the dialogue of a security official giving reports on events as the vehicle. One such piece of information, for example, is the name of a bank employee named Ezzat who has been missing for a few days, discovered on the memory card of the mobile phone owned by a Mossad agent recently arrested. At the same time the script has depicted a meeting between Salwa and an Israeli Arab, in which she asks him about the Egyptian Embassy. The man says he does not know where it is, but Salwa still asks him for help, explaining that she is unfairly detained by her Mossad agent husband -- the man is visibly frightened, and drives her away. In the next sequence an intelligence report appears in Egypt indicating that an Arab Israeli visited the Egyptian Embassy in Tel Aviv to report that detainment of an Egyptian woman by her Israeli husband, and so the Egyptian intelligence officials realise that the woman in question is the wife of Ezzat, the bank employee. Both logically and illogically, the script moves towards a meeting between Mustafa and Salwa, who as yet have no reason to know each other. In fact there is no dramatic reason for them to know each other at all. The justification for their meeting is simply the drive to have reached, by the end of the film, that cliched climax in which a difficult mission -- that of rescuing Salwa from her husband and the terrible, terrible destiny he has imposed on her -- enables the viewer to enjoy the greatest degree of heightened action and violence. The script breaks the narrative flow of the drama and oversteps the bounds of the plot to thrust Mustafa, the protagonist, into the Mossad headquarters to search for one agent's private papers concerning assassination operations in Egypt. While reviewing the list of targets he discovers himself among them -- a terrible dramatic blunder considering that he will subsequently be arrested and tortured in order to extract information rather than killed per se, and even sent to hospital in order to save his life. It is this arrest that will lead to the denouement of the film, with a mini war within Tel Aviv. But the plot has let the screenwriter down since the opening of them: only now, however, is the extent to which the storyline is broken become fully apparent. In the process of rescuing Salwa and her two children Mustafa meets with an intelligence agent who has been working in Israel for 20 years and thus acquired much experience there, but it is never explained why it is Mustafa and not this man who played the central part in saving Salwa from life in the capital of the enemy, whether in the acquisition of information or the actual rescue operation. Why it is that this man, the Israel-based Egyptian intelligence officer, is not the principal contact between Egyptian officials and the abducted woman -- that too is never explained. At the very least he could have been made Mustafa's principal aid in the rescue operation, which he is not. This is especially unconvincing in the light of the subsequent small-scale battle that occurs to save Mustafa -- now abduced by Mossad -- towards the end of the film within Tel Aviv, which makes it clear, ludicrous as the supposition remains, just how many dozens of well-trained and highly capable Egyptian intelligence officers live undercover in Israel, with access to weapons they can use against Israelis. The action is brilliantly choreographed in the following sequence, depicting the street war, on one of Tel Aviv's thoroughfares, between armed Mukhabarat and Mossad agents -- a completely illogical scene from the dramatic point of view. Mustafa then leaves his colleague, who is wounded in the shoulder, explaining his plan to meet with him at the Jordanian border, whence he is to flee with Salwa, by a certain hour of the night and through a certain route. As per the rules of action, Mustafa and Salwa must be followed, however -- by none other than Daniel, who shoots his own wife (but fails to kill her) only to end up burning to death thanks to Mustafa. The film ends with a line of Mustafa's that he utters while looking down on Tel Aviv from a hilltop, as if addressing the entire Palestinian people: "We will be back." We hear no more of the wounded colleague, who never appears -- nor does Mustafa show the least concern for his absence. The political sub-text of this film makes for complete overkill. In one scene, for example, Daniel is being interrogated by a female official on his return to Israel, informing her of the details of his undercover work in Cairo and the many assassinations he helped plan and orchestrate, when she suddenly asks him why he feels violence against a "friendly country" like Egypt is necessary or worthwhile. Such questions and statements of goodwill are good for media consumption, he tells her. The truth is that Egypt is Israel's number-one enemy, he insists. It is necessary for Israel's survival to drown Egypt in as many troubles and problems as possible -- a horrendously self-delusional, horrendously wide-spread, horrendously cliched piece of populist wisdom, this. Even the characters are formed according to a preconceived idea of a political grand narrative, and political correctness is used to make up for this and to help justify it. One Palestinian worker whom Mustafa comes across in the course of his journey to Tel Aviv, for example, is a racist who refuses to help Mustafa or share his money with him -- as if to say that, good though The Palestinian may be, some Palestinians are nonetheless bad. The script emphasises this fact, ignoring the reality of Palestinian workers contributing to the building of the Wall for example. Likewise on the other side of the divide: the Egyptian-Jewish pharmacist Victor, for whom Mustafa works on his arrival in Tel Aviv, is not only kind and peaceful but repeatedly nostalgic for Egypt, constantly listening to great Egyptian singers like Om Kulthoum and Mohammad Abdel-Wahab. The screenwriter even invents a scene specifically constructed to affirm the tolerant nature of this man: when a whistle goes off on the streets of Tel Aviv to mark the memory of the Holocaust and Mustafa asks him how Israelis can remember the Holocaust while completely forgetting the horrors to which they subject Palestinians on a daily basis, Victor replies: "It's true. I am Jewish, yes. But I am not Zionist." How utterly awful that yet another cliché of Arab nationalist discourse -- that while Zionists deserve all the hatred in the world, Jews may in fact be relatively okay -- is deployed to make this point. Yet in the end the most fantastical character seems to be the protagonist himself: Mustafa is neither logically nor convincingly constructed, which is in itself quite a feat considering that the protagonist is the one character with whom the viewer is expected to identify. We know for example that Mustafa is completely fluent in Hebrew, yet he seems to know nothing about either Israelis or Israeli society: that it is made up of Zionists, non- Zionists, peace activists and others. It is a well-known fact that plenty of specialists in Egypt have studied Israel, be they intelligence agents, academics or journalists. Such people know Israeli society well and deeply, in detail. So why should Mustafa, one such character, appear so completely astonished by everything he comes across there? Not only this: Mustafa is also far too sensitive to be an intelligence agent; he is so sensitive he frequently breaks into tears, and is liable to lose control in numerous situations where a properly trained official would find it easy to have a grip on himself. Despite the technical skill displayed by Sherif Arafa in the street battle in the final sequence of the film, no doubt the most costly aspect of the entire production as well, it is arguably this very sequence that brings the film down dramatically and artistically more than any other element in its constitution, since it turns Welad Al-Amm, in effect, into a B or even C-class movie reminiscent of the Delta Force series starring the B-movie icon Chuck Norris all through the 1980s. Yet it is also clear that the filmmakers have achieved their principal aim in presenting the ordinary viewer with a grossing entertainment during a season that lacks even the bare minimum of good commercial cinema. The film's principal virtue, however, is the way in which it demonstrates that it is no longer difficult to produce a good action film in Egypt -- whether in terms of cost or filmmaking technique. What is saddening, though, is that it also demonstrates the difference between an A-class action movie and a B-movie in the action genre. An A-class action movie is not only action and excitement but action and excitement bound up in a powerful plot that justifies and explains it. And this is certainly more than what Welad El-Amm has to offer, in the end.
