Hala Khalil's Qas we Lazq (Cut and Paste) and Khaled Marie's Taymour we Shafiqa (Taymour and Shafiqa) may be this summer's most notable offerings, but Mohamed El-Assyouti and Hani Mustafa find them a little too TV for comfort Gamila is almost 30, and her only dream is to immigrate. She feels her life in Egypt is a waste. She is bright and good at what she does: buying and selling objects, including pets -- a harp and a parrot are particularly interesting -- allowing her to save the money she needs to go through with her plan. The only glitch is that, to fulfill all 23 of the conditions imposed by the New Zealand Embassy to be eligible for immigration, she must either do it before her 30th birthday or else be married; and when she encounters a kindly young man who installs satellite dishes for lack of a better job, Youssef, she convinces him to marry her so that they will both be eligible for immigration; once in New Zealand they can separate. Complications arise; finally, they are married; they sort of fall in love; but the prospects of immigration remain largely uncertain. There are other characters. Gamila's friend Zeinab, who was jilted by her boyfriend when she so much as mentioned marriage, and Youssef's friend Sami, who walks around with a file in which he keeps his credentials in order to apply for jobs, also start a relationship. All four characters suffer. Gamila's widowed mother works as a hairdresser and shares with her daughter a relationship in which love is not expressed; rather, a protective layer of indifference and absorption in work prevents any serious emotional engagement. Mother and daughter live together under the same roof but they do not share their secrets: the mother is surprised when she discovers her daughter's passport and immigration papers. There is mutual exploitation and emotional blackmail whereby the daughter's marriage, the legitimacy of which is dependent on the mother's approval, will supposedly compensate the mother for early widowhood and, by bringing another man into the family, relieve her of her burden. The situation is complicated further when the in-laws of Youssef's brother realise that the couple are to live together with Youssef, shedding light on yet a third of the problems facing young Egyptians, besides unemployment and the difficulty of having relationships: lack of living space. Other characters include a friend of Youssef and Sami's who, in a flat he has bought in a remote satellite city, offers young men porn, drink and drugs: a lucrative business, he says, since they seldom have anything better to do. There is also a friend of Gamila's, married with three children, who in eight years has seen her husband a total of ten times because he works in an Arab country and cannot afford to have the family with him: she tries to explain to Gamila, who remains a virgin, what it is for a married woman to be sexually deprived. With this set of characters the film broaches the question why intelligent young people like Gamila resolve to leave a country so engrossed in poverty and corruption it gives its young no opportunities. In what is perhaps the film's most direct and succinct line, Gamila explains how today's marriages are based on lies: the women are only interested in moving on, to avoid being spinsters, so they persuade the men that they love them; the men are only interested in having a partner, so they pretend that they believe them. Such is the case with Gamila and Youssef. They come together by pure coincidence and though they grow to like each other, their social and economic situation prevents them from examining their feelings towards each other or even enjoying a romantic moment. Zeinab and Sami offer another example of an arrangement of convenience rather than a genuine love affair. And hence the title of the film: the name of a game in which one person starts singing the main chorus line of a song and another, picking up the last word from that line, starts singing another, and so on. It expresses the continuous random movement of Egyptians, who live from one day to the next without much hope, desperately attempting to survive by juggling around small deals, the way Gamila does in her work. Even in relationships, therefore, partners fall into place quite randomly. Along those lines the film seems sincere; in terms of tone, it manages to strike a difficult balance of comedy and melodrama on the one hand and romance and social drama on the other. Nevertheless, on many levels the film flounders. Many unjustifiable scenes provoke an eerie sense of déjà-vu, with the situations recalling television soap operas and some 1970s fare. The characters are all victims of their circumstances, they are all good at heart; and they all verge on naïveté, especially the protagonist Youssef. It is true that this sense of being cornered and trapped is almost synonymous with what it means to be Egyptian but the effect of this on the psyche of the characters is skimmed over by the script in favour of conventional plot development. Good acting on screen has become such a rare thing that when Sherif Munir makes a little effort in the lead role, this is hailed as brilliant acting. On the other hand, while Hanan Turk gives her usual, very weak performance -- so incapable of expressing emotions is Hanan Turk, indeed, that her decision to quit the profession and don the veil may well be her greatest achievement -- the newcomer Marwa Mahran, as well as Hanan Mutaw'i, Fathi Salama and Sawsan Badr, give remarkable performances. Sherin Farghali's set design is adequate, unlike Tareq El-Telmissani's cinematography which is clearly if uncharacteristically off the mark. Tamer Karawan's music is expressive of the general mellow mood of the film, with the occasional touch of humour. The inclusion of songs specifically made for the film on the soundtrack is very remarkable in itself. Peter Weir's Green Card (1990), with Gérard Depardieu and Andie MacDowell, is the story of a Frenchman, Georges Faure, who needs a green card to stay in the US for work and an American woman, Bront� Parrish, who wants to rent a flat only available to married couples: a marriage of convince ensues and the couple only fall in love much later. Weir's original screenplay was nominated for awards by the Writers Guild of America, the British Academy (BAFTA) and the American Academy (Oscar). That there is a clear similarity between the main premise of Qas we Lazq and that of Green Card should not undermine the relative importance of the Egyptian film, which touches on many relevant and real issues, albeit in a way more like television drama than cinema. Nevertheless, the film's weakness resides in focussing on the general condition of the characters, relegating their particularities and idiosyncrasies to second place. My wife, my boss There is a quick and easy recipe when it comes to preparing a summer film. All the filmmakers need to do is mix in the ingredients that draw in movie goers at this time of year: a little romance, much preferred by the 15-25 age group; a little comedy, of universal appeal; and maybe some action, for the, well, 8- to 25-year-olds. Yet this magic combination will as often lack any sense, so biting the biggest portion of the summer box office cake will as often not mean success. There is nothing wrong with the pursuit of profit except that, in such cases as this, what it means in practice is a very unsuccessful film. The plot in Taymour and Shafiqa is reminiscent of Fateen Abdel-Wahab's Sixties classic Merati Moudir 'Aam (My Wife, General Manager), starring Salah Zulfuqar and Shadia. The difference between the two films is rather one of timing. The older film was released while the fem lib movement was finally harvesting the fruits of efforts begun at the turn of the century with the work of Qasim Amin and Huda Sha'rawi. In the 1950s and 1960s the national liberation movement was peaking, and the same could be said for the women's liberation movement. The film opened in a way that was criticised by many as patriarchal, but went on to present very positive characters. In Taymour and Shafiqa scriptwriter Tamer Habib tries to trace the beginning of Taymour's love for his neighbour Shafiqa back to their childhood. He reveals to the viewer the development of Taymour's dominating personality. The two main characters live in Maadi, placing them in the upper middle class. In the older film, though the couple live in a villa, signalling wealth, the script insists on giving them a middle-class feel with their car continually breaking down and needing a little push from the doorman: Zulfuqar plays an engineer in a public-sector company (the overwhelming majority of companies at the time were public-sector) where his wife happens to become general manager. In Taymour and Shafiqa, on the other hand, it is the constant bickering of the two young people that makes for the central theme of the film. In these arguments the scriptwriter doubles the dose of comedy, especially during their violent fights -- the best part. Nothing prepares the viewer for the coincidence whereby Shafiqa (Mona Zaki) becomes minister of the environment and Taymour (Ahmed El-Saqqa), a police officer, is placed in charge of her security. The development is at best unconvincing: Shafiqa is little more than a diligent graduate student, far too young to join the Egyptian cabinet, and the excuse offered by the prime minister (Gamil Rateb) -- that more young people should occupy ministerial positions -- is lame indeed. Taymour's character is rather more coherent and remains so throughout the film: his dominant tendencies, which take him to the police academy; the violent, patriarchal way in which he expresses his romantic feelings. Unlike the comedy in Merati Moudir 'Aam, which derives from the carefully crafted reactions of a whole host of characters -- the gossiping employee (Tawfiq El-Diqen), the employee who does not know how to deal with a female boss (Adel Imam), the overly religious employee (Shafiq Noureldin) -- the comedy here is a function of the exchanges between the minister and her head of security, with the tension gradually escalating, and moving away from comedy, eventually to climax in the Ukraine, where the ministers attending an environmental conference are abducted by militants trying to free their imprisoned leader. Khaled Marie has experience as an editor but this is his directorial debut, and it does not seem as if his editing experience has put him in control of the tempo of the film. There are many problems in the pacing of the finale. These exaggerated scenes transport the film suddenly from romantic comedy to action: fights, murder, explosions... It is as if the director wants all the eggs in one basket, only to imitate Hollywood with appropriately Soviet villains. But even in Hollywood there is a logic to gun battles and car chases -- some kind of escalation, some kind of logic in the use of guns, convincingly coordinated timing -- rather than a fight just happening and the hero knocking down his opponents one after the other. But it seems Marie has not even played video games. Taymour and Shafiqa also presents us with an overly backward logic when the girl gives up her position as a minister to marry her lover while the strong macho lead gets everything. He beats up the gang to save his girlfriend and then keeps his job and marries her. Fateen Abdel-Wahab's film, shot 40 years earlier, presents a more honourable compromise: the wife-general manager asks to be transferred to another company and on her first day of the new job she finds that her husband too has had himself transferred to work under her command. The least that can be said is that it was a progressive end to a light film.
