CAIRO - Selfishness may not be the best quality in human beings, but it is definitely in all of us. To a certain extent, people are as defined by their flaws as their virtues, as well as how these sides of the character interact. Creating a character that little more than a mix and match of different traits does not lend them a sense of “realism”, because that is not how real people work; if a film-maker presents a character whose intended role is to just represent a “copy and paste” mix of different characters so we might feel there is a real image of everyone, we end up with the individual sense getting lost in the mix. While there the “everyman” character does have their place in the Arts, it's very rare for a good writer to present the character as nothing more than that. Because of the scale of the revolution, the “I” in films might be somewhat lost, ironically enough. In order for the January 25 events to have an impact, of course the “I” had to be changed to “We” to a certain extent. With the trending and unavoidable genre of revolution films, we will get loads of characters that don't really have to represent themselves; they will all become symbols for the Egyptian people as a whole or something like talking metaphors. The characters are there to represent characters / Egyptian citizens; they are there to illustrate to us their suffering, their sadness, and perhaps their moments of happiness. However, at the core, it's almost empty this way, because it becomes somewhat simplistic and merges thousands of possible problems, issues, and lives into a symbolic mass. The character will have all the emotions any character should have, but there won't be that “something extra” about them that will make them pop. Not that this hasn't been a problem in the past, but because this revolution was bigger than huge and totally unexpected, films about the event will probably be more plot-driven than character-driven, we will run through the same sorts of stock characters that we would expect from an event like this. Of course, there will be new archetypes presented, or rather, old ones reinvented to fit in with the new material, just as much as we will see the image of the big crowd circling Al Tahrir Square, we will see the poor man suffering, the street kids, and the violence that's put them in this place. But how many characters will truly stand out as having individual personalities in any of these movies? Take Khaled Yousef's films, for example, since he is self-proclaimed as “one of the people that foresaw the revolution.” His films of course dealt with many of the things that ultimately led to the beginning of the revolution. But how many of his characters really stand out in those films, whether they're in “Hena Maysara” (“When Things Get Better,” 2007), “Rayis Omar Harb” (“Chief Omar Harb,” 2008), or even “Dokkan Shehata” (2009). You may remember some funny lines from Amr Abd el-Galil, or a particular scene that stood out, but the characters themselves are forgettable. A simple example is of a very funny “Superbad” (2007), a character-driven film about teenagers and their hormones, which managed to have the plot move by the action of these characters; their situation didn't change them, they try to adapt as much as they can with whatever the situation they had to face. However, they really only act within the pre-existing personality of their characters, like actual people do, and that actually made them more realistic. With ensemble cast films, it's more difficult for one particular character to stand out, and no doubt a lot of the revolution films will end up being an ensemble cast dramas. Indeed, if one looks at a film like “Amarat Ya`qubian” (“The Ya`qubian Building,” 2006), a film which for the most part felt like a long soap opera, there is still some characters like Haytham, the gay journalist played by Khaled El Sawy, who is remembered not just because the actor gave a such strong performance, but because the character had a well-developed story. His dialogue wasn't random and simply crafted to fit the plot of the film – instead, it felt like his words would only come from him: they were shaped by his environment, life experiences, and memory. That's the big issue here; it's not just about the direction, or about how well-developed it should be, but it's really about the way the characters are written. People's personalities on film are composed of primarily (beyond external issues like camera work) the way they speak. The dialogue in film has become generic and unreal, passing way beyond the usual “language of film” theory that the dialogue in film is written in a way which never fully captures how real people speak. Film characters don't speak even remotely realistically either, and now it's come to a point where all the character dialogue is nearly interchangeable if not for simple plot demands, and so ends up sounding the same. Yes, we came together for the revolution, all having one goal, but what brought us to it wasn't all the same reasons. Even the ones who had similar reasons, whether it was poverty, unemployment, the non-existent freedom, etc. didn't necessarily express them in the same way. If we say that this is the case for real life, then at least a fraction of this should be replicated on screen. Each character should have their own way to deal with their lives, to end up reaching their specific goals, and that needs to be visible on the screen. It needn't be complicated, because some motivations are simple. But it should be believable.
