Since its release late last year, the Egyptian film Heen Maysara has won both praise and condemnation. But is the film really more political pamphlet than work of art, asks Hani Mustafa Released late last year, the Egyptian film Heen Maysara (Until Better Times) has been widely discussed in the newspapers and on satellite television, with men of religion leading the attack on this film for what they describe as its "attempt to destroy social morality." The most recent round of these attacks began last week when professor at Cairo University Abdel-Sabour Shahin, an Islamist known for his attack on what he sees as literature undermining Islamic values, demanded that the authorities take action against the writer, director and actors in the film for what he described as its "spreading of homosexuality and moral corruption." There were "American and Zionist hands" behind the film, Shahin said, as there were behind other "deviant" works of art. Shahin's attacks came at the end of widespread discussion of Heen Maysara in the media over the past two months that has concentrated more on the social and political content of the film than on the film as a work of art. In some ways, this has reflected the nature of the film itself, which could be seen as being more of a political pamphlet than a work of art. An artist writing a script for a film is often caught between his position as an artist who wants to present a genuine work of art, and his desire to present a work of political analysis. This then puts the artwork in danger of turning into just another article or piece of political commentary. This is a danger that is all the more serious when a filmmaker adopts a political position to the left of that of the government. Such a position can lead him to play the role of a political agitator, rather than that of a film director, and it can lead both intellectuals and politicians to stop watching the film as a work of art and judge it instead along political lines. Something of this sort has happened in the case of Heen Maysara, which, written by Nasser Abdel-Rahman and directed by Khaled Youssef, is set in an informal housing area of Cairo, making the film suitable as a vehicle for political protestations. At the beginning of the film, and while the opening titles roll, newspaper clippings are seen presenting the problems of the informal housing areas. The audience is thus informed of the filmmaker's interest even before the film has started and given all the references they need for the drama to follow. It is probably not wide of the mark to assume that Abdel-Rahman and Youssef borrowed ideas for the film from newspaper accounts of crimes and other incidents, giving the film its air of realism and its ambition of dealing with pressing socio-economic problems. There is the poverty of the informal housing area, for example, which is the main theme of the film. In the opening scenes, viewers are presented with a panorama of one such area and are introduced to the film's main characters. These include Adel, a young man also known as Hashisha, played by Amr Saad, his mother, played by Hala Fakher, and his neighbour, played by Amr Abdel-Galil. In his films, Youssef has long been concerned with socio-political context, something that was evident in his Al-Assifa (The Storm), set against the background of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. However, in The Storm there was already a feeling that Youssef had over-simplified events, and the current film also starts in 1990, this time in an area lived in by members of the poorest classes of Egyptian society. The relationships between the characters in Youssef's film do not differ in their essentials from those portrayed in other films of the "new realism", such as Dawoud Abdel-Sayed's Al-Kit Kat, or Khairy Bishara's Youm Mor, Youm Helw (Bitter Day, Sweet Day). Depicting the lives of the marginalised is nothing new on the Egyptian screen, films made in the 1980s and 90s also criticising the reality in which Egyptians were living and the prevalent extreme poverty. None of this has changed. However, both Abdel-Sayed and Bishara had an artistic perspective on their material, allowing them to gather different relationships and use them to feed the drama of their films, which were usually based on the traditional hardships of the middle classes. Youssef's perspective, by contrast, is primarily political, and he uses this in his film's many scenes that depict the lives of the downtrodden. The editing ties events in the private lives of the characters, such as in their sexual relationships, with the military events taking place around them up to the most recent Gulf War and the US-led occupation of Iraq. Youssef also borrows from, or imitates, Youssef Chahine, who, in his film Al-Asfour (The Sparrow) had used editing to show the domestic lives of two of that film's characters simultaneously with events in the 1967 War, in which the main character's brother dies. This was among the most visually effective aspects of Chahine's film, and the device earned its place within the drama. Youssef's use of the device, by contrast, is unsubtle, and the director prefers to simplify a more complex reality, resulting in the juxtaposition of the bombing of Iraq and a scene of rape, for example. The film is also laden with "issues" from the crime pages of newspapers. Nahed (Sumaya El-Khashab), for example, has a relationship with Adel that results in an unwanted child. Because she does not have the financial means to support the child, she leaves him on a bus, from where he is adopted by a couple of rich villagers who give him to the adoptive mother's sister when they have a child of their own. In a melodramatic twist redolent of the films of the 1950s, the child runs away when his aunt refuses to take him to the park with her children. The child, named Ayman, then becomes homeless, this having become a much-discussed problem over the last two years, especially as a result of the El-Torbini case in which a homeless young man was convicted of killing a number of other homeless children. At the end of the film we see a man similar to El-Torbini leading a gang trying to attack Ayman, who is perched on the top of a train. Informal housing areas are thought to provide a breeding ground for terrorism, and Adel's family comes into contact with this issue through his brother Reda (Khaled Saleh), who has long been missing in Iraq. After the invasion of Iraq, the police discover that Reda is a leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq and that he is trying to start similar activities in Cairo. Here unintentional fantasy comes into the film, and the audience is presented with the torture of Reda's family and neighbours, in order that they will reveal his whereabouts. Suspense is thrown in for good measure, as when the script reveals information about the head of a terrorist cell in the area, who then turns out to be a kindly taxi driver A'm Amin (Ahmed Bedair). The most developed character in the film is Fathi, Adel's friend and neighbour, who is unable to have children but becomes comfortable with this fact since he believes he is a man on the margins of society and should therefore not bring children into the world. One might say that putting all his eggs into one basket is exactly what Khaled Youssef has done. Heen Maysara is a prime example of what happens when a filmmaker attempts to say everything in too restricted a space and ends up with a too generalised view of Egyptian society. As a result, the film resembles a digest of what has been written about in the newspapers, with a script close to a report prepared by an NGO, more than it does a truly imaginative account of real conditions in Egypt. Heen Maysara is currently on show in various commercial cinemas, including Metro and Rivoli in Downtown, OG in Maadi and Nile City Mall.
