The Baby Doll Night is an intriguing example of an Egyptian political film gone badly awry, writes Hani Mustafa Political events often influence artistic productions, and commercial filmmaking is no stranger to the use of a political atmosphere. Many films became box office hits during the Cold War, for example, by importing the paraphernalia of the conflict, the James Bond series being just one example. Similarly, Francis Ford Coppola used events from the Vietnam War in his film Apocalypse Now, which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1979 and Best Picture at the Oscars in 1980. However, while many films use political events as background material or even as the subject of the script, few of these films are appreciated for their artistic merit. Political events are not lacking in the Arab world, and directors have long tried to make films referring to them, with greater or lesser degrees of success. Today, the most important political events are taking place in Palestine and Iraq, and these two countries have naturally drawn the attention of film directors worldwide. The Italian comedian and director Roberto Benigni's film The Tiger and the Snow, for example, deals with the war in Iraq through the story of an Italian poet who receives a phone call from an Iraqi friend, telling him that his ex-wife, a volunteer for the Red Cross, has been injured during the US-led invasion. A characteristic mixture of romance and black comedy, the film takes place sometime after the events of April 2003 and depicts the poet's journey to save his ex- wife, whom he still loves. While the film does not present the politics of the Iraqi situation directly, it nevertheless shows politics as forming the backdrop to the story. It received many awards in Italy, but was less well received internationally. Another film taking the US-led invasion of Iraq for material is Laylet Suqout Baghdad (The Night Baghdad Fell), made three years ago by the Egyptian director and scriptwriter Mohamed Amin. This film is also a comedy, in fact coming quite close to being a fantasy, in which the headmaster of an Egyptian secondary school fears that after the US has finished the invasion of Iraq it will turn its attention to Egypt. He therefore asks a gifted former student for help in warding off the feared US invasion, asking him to work on a weapon that can deflect it. While the film is no doubt enjoyable on the level of satire, its political reflections are strictly those of an overheated teenager. Another recent Arab film that has taken war in the region as a subject is Khaled Youssef's Heen Maysara, completed last year, in which the Gulf war is shown as part of the backdrop to individual lives. The brother of the main character in this film is shown working in Iraq, and the state security forces are shown hunting for him following accusations that he was a member of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and is attempting to form a cell in Cairo. However, more up to date than either of these productions is Baby Doll Night, which is currently on release in Egypt's cinemas. This film, produced by Good News Productions and costing around LE 50 million, is based on a screenplay by the late Abdel-Hay Adib, father of the head of the production company, and it is directed by another of his sons, Adel Adib. Baby Doll Night is an Egyptian film touching on political issues, this time dealing with what happened between 11 September 2001, the explosion that took place in Palestine after 28 September 2001, and the US-led invasion of Iraq. The film thus ties together political events taking place around the Arab world something in the way that the Oscar-winning American film Syriana did in 2005. In the film Abdel-Hay Adib presents events taking place in the space of just one night, New Year's Eve, around the Arab world. Neither he nor the film's director spend time developing the film's characters, seeking instead to focus on the film's political themes. At the beginning of the film we are shown Hossam, the film's main character played by Mahmoud Abdel-Aziz, an Egyptian who lives in the US, and who is on his way to Egypt for a brief holiday. As Hossam leaves his house in New York on New Year's Eve to the airport, he remembers -- for some untold reason -- the events of 11 September 2001 and the panic experienced by people in the streets. The film uses flashbacks in order to pass from the experience of one character to another, while always keeping to the framework of a single night -- the Babydoll night of the title. That night is meant to be a night for Hossam and his wife Samiha (Sulaf Fawakherji) to be spent intimately after Hossam was treated in the US with a new fertility drug. In anticipation of that night, Hossam had bought a Babydoll lingerie for his wife, but this intimate encounter is disrupted by the presence of a US peace delegation in the hotel where Hossam and Samiha are spending the night, and by a terrorist attempt on the lives of the delegates. The American peace delegation is headed by a Jewish woman, Sarah Shrouder, played by Laila Elwi, who is presented as having escaped from the Holocaust at the age of four, in which both her parents were killed by the Nazis. Sarah is not a Zionist, and the filmmakers present her as an American Jewish woman who is in love with an Egyptian businessman and member of parliament, Azmi (played by Ezzat Abu Ouf), who also happens to be Hossam's uncle and is someone who gives priority to business over everything else. Unfortunately, the politics of the film are superficial, and the director only makes things worse by his excessive use of flashbacks, which are used to indicate the characters' personal and political motivations. Sarah, like many Jews, insists on Israel's legitimacy because of her memories of her mother's death at the hands of the Nazis in Europe. On the other hand, she also sympathises with the Palestinians and does not deny them their right of return and their right to a state. Later in the film, we are introduced to Awadeen (Nour El-Sherif), a terrorist who attempts to blow up the hotel in which the American delegation is staying. He wants revenge on the Americans for what he suffered at the hands of US prison guards in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, where he was wrongly imprisoned while working in Iraq as an interpreter. While all this is presented as accounting for Awadeen's actions in Cairo, things are stretched perhaps a bit too far when it turns out that the US "General Peter" (Gamil Rateb), who was stationed at Abu Ghraib, is now one of the members of the American delegation in Cairo. Another character is the taxi driver, Shukri, who is half Syrian and half Egyptian and who has studied in Egypt. Following the end of his university education, Shukri is unable to find any other job apart from that of a cab driver, and he helps Awadeen in his terrorist activities because of the treatment he received at the hands of the Egyptian Central Security Forces following his participation in a demonstration in Cairo. Hossam tells Sarah about a Palestinian friend (Nichole Saba) whose brother was killed by the Israelis. She then carries out an attack in Israel on an Israeli politician, which fails, leading to her death at the hands of the Israeli security forces. This scene is as absurd as it sounds, even though the events depicted are based on a real event. One emerges from Baby Doll Night wondering at the sons of Abdel-Hay Adib, who have honoured their late father by providing a huge budget to make a film from his last script. While the film is full of ideas and historical events, it is sadly devoid of political sophistication, plot and even logic. The only performance in it that can really be enjoyed is that of Ahmed Mekki as the taxi driver. This cannot have been the director's intention, but audiences emerge from the film feeling rather as if they have seen a spoof movie, instead of one that aims to be a convincing drama. It cannot have been the brothers' intention to make something so unfortunately close to the US 'Airplane' series or to the 'Scary Movies'.
