Hani Mustafa registers the difference between artistry and artifice When they embark on genres without precedent in the local tradition, Egyptian filmmakers tend to take the easy way out and, rather than coming up with formulae of their own, rely on foreign models. That is undoubtedly the case with horror thrillers, of which there are only a handful in Egyptian film history, the genre having proved popular with neither audiences nor producers. Perhaps such lack of popularity has to do with the suspension of disbelief required of the horror viewer -- in contrast to the high level of realism to which the Egyptian viewer has been accustomed since the earliest talking pictures in the 1930s. To compensate for lack of experience when they opt for a horror film today, Egyptian filmmakers will "borrow" not only a storyline or plot but, more significantly for the viewing experience as a whole, the colour and atmosphere of the scenes -- down to the sets, camera work, even the style of direction. Written by Mohamed Diyab, filmmaker Mohammed Gomaa's recently released debut Ahlam Haqiqiya (Real Dreams) opens with a detailed exposition of the daily life a computing-company employee-cum-housewife, Mariam (Hanan Tork), traditionally married to the plastic surgeon Ahmed (Khaled Saleh). Gomaa's experience has clearly been restricted to the music video, in which the drive to beautify and enthral visually overrules verisimilitude or even aesthetic integrity. Certainly the fierce competition and the money involved in the production of Arab music videos have given rise to an aesthetic all their own, but it is a far from cinematic aesthetic, and will inevitably have a promotional, ad-like effect. In Ahlam Haqiqiya this is somewhat justified in that Ahmed being extremely well-heeled, he may well have a house where every last corner might as well be the set for a music video. The household atmosphere is unhappy, with the relations between husband and wife being too cool due mostly to Mariam's persistent depression; one unnecessary scene, in the attempt to drive this point home, works against the entire dramatic line, with Mariam and Ahmed's daughter Aya -- at school -- emphatically telling her teacher that she loves her, the teacher, more than Mariam herself. The director launches into the plot from the very first scene, playing the ususal -- hackneyed -- game of keeping vital information from the viewer. In one scene, for example, both parents are calling Aya from separate points in a villa with a swimming pool; the girl is unsure which parent she should go to, until Mariam produces a gun and shoots her own daughter: we do not realise this is a recurrent nightmare of Mariam's until we have been deceived into believing it actually happened, confusing the progression of events in our minds. The action consists of nothing more than the boring details of the two spouses' lives and Mariam's dreams, which provides plenty of opportunity for confusing different levels of reality with each other. The central plot point is not revealed until the climax of the film, when Mariam, having dreamt that she killed her boss Abdel-Hamid (Ahmed Kamal) arrives at work the next day to realise that Abdel-Hamid has really been killed. And then the story takes off. Perhaps it was the filmmakers' concern that the central role of the policeman who takes on the murder Emad would not otherwise be justified that drove them to make him Mariam's former lover-fiancé, who has not forgotten her after so many years. However it remains unclear why, when people whom Mariam dreams of killing continue to be killed -- the security man at the restaurant where Ahmed and Mariam spent the evening, Mariam's friend and colleague Mai (Dalia El-Beheiri), Mai's psychiatrist Itimad (Magda El-Khatib) -- it is Emad who investigates their murders; it's as if Emad is the only murder detective in all of Cairo. Nor is the way in which Emad develops the suspicion that Mariam is involved in these murders very convincing: the otherwise unnecessary scene in which he notices Mariam with Mai shopping near the place where the security man was killed. Emad's only convincing motive is the anger he has felt since Mariam's parents refused to let them marry; and in the absence of material evidence of any kind, his pursuit of Mariam seems not only unconvincing but silly. Likewise the manner in which he realises that Mai had been a psychiatric patient: going to the peculiarly isolated asylum where Itimad works for no reason whatsoever. And yet this is the point at which the mystery begins to be unravelled. Indeed the final part of the film is devoted entirely to making the necessary connections and resolving the many ambiguities that have come up in the meantime: a task it doesn't manage too well. It doesn't help to introduce further details like the fact that Mai's husband and son had been killed in an accident and that she was envious of Mariam. Thus the resolution of the mystery, in this case, takes place in the final quarter of the film rather than concluding the action as a whole. It is worth noting, in this context, that such a resolution is the factor that tells a good horror thriller apart from a week one: both are plot-dependent but they develop the plot cinematically to varying degrees of success. Sadly Ahlam Haqiqiya is full of loopholes from the first scene on; the explanation for Mariam's dreams -- that she is telepathically linked to Mai -- strikes the viewer as incredibly naive in the end. Even the scene intended to reveal that -- when both friends order the same "Nescafe Black" -- is entirely ridiculous. The drive to branch out into new genres is commendable in itself but the tendency to present a life distinctly different from life in Egypt as we know it tends to undermine any possible achievement; and to refer to Ahlam Haqiqiya as the first Egyptian horror film -- or even a good horror film -- is to promulgate untruth, not only because the film is so weak on the whole but because long ago filmmaker Kamal El-Sheikh, in a way far less dependent on the Western model, had produced much better fare in this vein.
