Hani Mustafa reviews the latest film adaptation of a novel Many contemporary screenplays are written specifically for cinema (and many in the history of Egyptian cinema were adapted from foreign films, notably Hollywood) but literature remains the principal source of inspiration for the movies. Egyptian films have been based on short stories and plays, even poems, though the novel, of course, remains the principal model, with the bulk of the films produced during the Golden Age (mid-1950s to early 1980s) based on the work of the best known names in modern Arabic literature: Naguib Mahfouz, Youssef Edriss, Abdul-Rahman Al-Sharqawi, Ihsan Abdul- Quddous, Youssef El-Sebai'. The principal problem with this mode of filmmaking is that it tends to reduce to the question of translating one medium into another; during the Golden Age it was writing skill, the capacity to adapt the time- frame of a novel to the screen and balancing cinematic creativity with the spirit of the original novel that counted the most. This is undoubtedly, at least in part, of the secret behind the phenomenal success of the films adapted from Naguib Mahfouz's novels, to which the fact that Mahfouz himself worked as a screenwriter undoubtedly contributed. For decades after that, however, cinema and the novel were divorced, seemingly irrevocably; and with the exception of some of the works of Dawoud Abdel-Sayyid -- notably Sariq Al Farah (The Wedding Thief, 1994) and Al Kitkat (1991), based on a novella by Khairi Shalaby and Ibrahim Aslan's novel Malik Al Hazin (Heron), respectively -- few novels found their way, in any form, onto the screen. Most recently, the success of The Yaqoubian Building (based on Alaa El-Aswany's novel of the same title, written by Wahid Hamid and directed by his son, Marwan Hamid) boosted the credibility of basing films on books. Sayyad Al Yamam (Dove Hunter) -- written by Alaa Azzam and directed by Ismail Murad -- is based on a short story by Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid; and as such, it is an interesting experiment. Ashraf Abdel-Baqi, the comedian who plays the lead, is among the least fortunate actors on screen; few of his films have proven very successful, even though, already talented, he is among those actors who make an effort to vary and improve his work. Yet many of the films in which he starred in the last ten years were remarkably modest. Exceptions include Hassan wa Aziza: Qadiyyat Amn Dawlah (Hassan and Aziza: State Security Case, 1999) and Rasha Gari'a (Splash, 2001). Perhaps, for Abdel-Baqi, Sayyad Al Yamam is an attempt to strike back on the strength of literature, thus making up for so many losses. Yet the film turns out to be a particularly unfortunate example of the process of translating one medium into another, since it is made up of a string of stories that are completely disconnected except for the character of Ali, the hunter in question, played by Abdel-Baqi, whose unsupported presence fails forge them into a convincing whole. Still, the film is infused with a literary spirit. It benefits from narration, for example: a disembodied voice who does not feature in the action (Ahmad Rateb); it seems the director sought out this technique because it helps hold together an otherwise flaky structure. To the same end the director and screenwriter make use of the first story featured, which seems to be of a magic realist nature. It concerns Ali's father Sayed (Ahmad Kamal), a railroad worker, and how he meets his mother (Donia). While on the tiny canal ferry, Sayed glimpses a girl sitting on the bank: in those opening scene, the narration and the audiovisual experience, both emphasising the literary flavour, are carbon copies of each other. The result is more comic than lyrical, lyrical being the intention of the filmmakers. But the magic realist approach continues as we find out that the girl in question has a strange psychological condition (which turns out to be Abdel-Meguid's take on the popular mythology of possession by the djinn). Yet the director does not manage to reproduce the link -- presumably existing in Abdel-Meguid's text -- between the condition of the girl on the one hand and the narrator's description of her as a houri on the other. As per the Upper Egyptian tradition to which Sayed belongs, on his death his wife is obliged to marry his brother, with whom she and Ali live in Upper Egypt. The magic realist flavour alters abruptly to an openly melodramatic one, and we see the mother's suffering with her new husband (who beats her up once she has a psychological episode, in contrast to the affection of Ali's father). Up to this point, the film holds together, somewhat -- but then Ali becomes a dove hunter. Inexplicably, as it seems, the action has shifted to Alexandria: already, by then, the mother died, and Ali attempted to murder his uncle by hitting him on the head with a cane. Now Ali is a young man making the acquaintance of his Alexandrine mentor (Talaat Zakariyya), who teaches him not only dove hunting but also the nightlife of Alexandria. This may indeed be the film's only light-hearted moment, since subsequent stories are full of unpleasant melodrama, dividing up the whole into brief magic realist and comedic scenes, with melodrama making up the greater part of the film. Before we have had time to digest or, crucially, to connect the disjointed episodes we have come across thus far, Ali meets a girl (Ola Ghanem), marries her, has two children by her, loses one of them in a car accident, and begins the downward spiral of dove hunting during which his marriage deteriorates -- marring his relationship with his wife. Ali's job is of course a metaphor for picking up women, which he does ceaselessly throughout the rest of the film. But the director proves unable to demonstrate the symbolic connection between the two activities. His imagination, it seems, is caught entirely by the tragic life conditions of the characters, not their human constitution, nor any holistic dramas they might go through. Such tragedies include the story of the police guard (Salah Abdalla) who harbours an unrequited love for a poor girl who sells tea near the train station (Basma) who is in turn in love with Ali. The guard has an affair with a woman (Salwa Othman) with whose daughter (Hanan Mutawi') Ali is having another affair -- an occasion to bring up these two women's own tragedy, who suffer the absence of the husband-father gone to work in the Gulf. These stories all revolve around loneliness and poverty. Such pluralism and variety in the characters and their stories does not serve the film, however, since it merely underlines the lack of structure, resulting in an incomplete and fragmented impression. Though the opening is relatively strong, the screenplay is so disjointed and badly paced that many of the viewers left before the end. No doubt literature can endorse cinema, whether by providing it with dramatic power or lending it intellectual depth. Yet filmmaking is a complex process in which equal attention must be paid to each part making up the whole, and to emphasise the literary without paying attention to the cinematic will just not produce effective cinema.
