Were it not for its puzzling ending and the author's and director's concern for the public, the film Farah [The wedding] would have been one of the top Egyptian movies over the past ten years. This film, created by Ahmed Abdallah and directed by Sameh Abdel Aziz, is a natural continuation of their previous film Cabaret. The only difference is the setting, although the characters and the social dimensions are the same. Most characters are sinners, but they are not happy about this and are indeed forced to be like this. This makes you - the viewer - feel sympathetic with them while being angry at them, as they are similar to you. For the author and the director, the end must be a sort of moral lesson, where the price must be paid as a way for one's conscience to make up for its sins before God first and then before the audience. Al-Farah is the story of a lie in which everyone agrees. Zeinhom (played by Khaled el-Sawi) wants to organize his sister's marriage, while Mahmoud el-Gundi is the one who organizes parties of such kind. Zeinhom has no sister, though, and he wants to stage this marriage just to get the money he needs to buy a microbus. This money is supposed to be given as gifts by those attending the wedding. As he has no sister, he rents a husband and a wife who are looking for money as a way of her restoring her virginity, although they are married. In fact, her family wants to boast about her honor on wedding night. The invitees know this is not true, yet everyone's happy with this lie, which also includes singing, dancing, alcohol, drugs and women. Zeinhom's mother, played by the wonderful Karima Mokhtar, is the voice of conscience and morality. She agrees to play this game, but she refuses the dancer and the drugs. The wedding ends with the death of the mother, yet everyone goes on with this false charade. The end is a tragedy, as everyone pays the price. The money is stolen and Zeinohm's wife insists on getting a divorce. The isolated monologist (Salah Abdallah) falls in front of his son, and the girl selling beer in the disguise of a man (Donia Samir Ghanem) kills Hassan el-Hasshash (Basim Samra) when he harasses her. The film almost ends with the scene of the gathering held in the following morning to offer condolences for the death of Zeinhom's mother, with Zeinhom looking up at the sky and repeating: "If only I hadn't listened to what they said." A normal ending. Yet, the director and the author backtrack and while the closing jingles are being played, they propose another solution, even if just in the protagonist's imagination. He refuses to go ahead with the wedding in respect for his dead mother, and everything goes on normally with no crimes and no divorce. It is as if he was telling us that punishment comes straight away, so you'd better choose the most ethical solution if you want to be spared. If we exclude the second end, the film reveals its actors' genius, as affirmed by film director Sameh Abdel Aziz. He indeed managed to get all those actors to identify themselves with their characters and actually feel them. I do not want to dwell on singling them out, yet Karima Mokhtar in a few scenes has a huge impact and so does Sausan Badr. The real star emerging in this movie is Maged Kudwani, while Khaled el-Sawi makes another astonishing performance, as usual. As for Donia Ghanem, she discovered herself in this role and so did Yasser Galal and Joumana Murad, who plays the role of the girl who wants to get her virginity back and feels a sense of injustice with great maturity. Finally, let's not forget Mi Kisab, the young lady married to an impotent man (Hassan Hosni). Al-Farah depicts men's defeat. The son and defeated husband (Zeinhom), the father defeated in front of his son (Salah Abdallah), the husband defeated in front of his wife (Hassan Hosni), the groom defeated in front of the society (Yasser Galal) and so on. The society in this movie is defeated and impotent and all it has is God. Yet, it only resolves to Him at the end, when the closing jingles are playing.
