THE new Egyptian film Ayisheen el- Lahza (Living the Moment) is described as torturously sleazy and bland. Film critics, who attended its premiere recently in Cairo, confessed that the movie, directed and written by Olfat Osman, left them fuming at its ridiculous technique, poorly written script and chaotically edited sequences. "You can't understand what's happening as scenes unfold before your eyes," said one critic. "When the public watch it, I'm sure they'll walk out before the end," added one of his colleagues. "I've wasted my time watching this film. It was an insult," roared a third critic. The critics were right: film fans are indeed very disappointed by Ayisheen el- Lahza, describing the characters, who are supposed to be undergraduates, as very unconvincing. "Although we figured out from the dialogue that these young people wereuniversity students, they weren't convincing," says Ahmed Saeed, a local film fan, who regrets wasting good money on the movie. "It's perplexing that these alleged students should spend their time entirely in discothèques, looking for drug dealers and talking about their sex lives," the disgruntled fan adds. "Much to our dismay, the girls in the film have sex with so many men that they don't know who the fathers of their children are." The director allegedly circulated stories that Ayisheen el-Lahza is about teenagers' emotional and sexual problems, in order to get young people to come and watch it. Ayisheen el-Lahza is Olfat's second film and it's just as disastrous as the first one, El-Hekaya fiha Mena (The Tale revolves round Mena). "Olfat Osman begged everybody who was disappointed by El-Hekaya fiha Mena to wait for her second film before condemning her. But she hasn't kept her promise. Perhaps, the director's stubbornness in doing the scripts for her films is partly to blame for their setback in the box office. The cast of Ayisheen el-Lahza, led by Randa el-Beheri, Yasser Farag and Inas el-Nagar, don't appear to be enthusiastic before the camera. "It seems as if these actors memorised the script parrot fashion and the director didn't encourage them to breathe any life into it," says Hamed Abdel Rahman an Egyptian film buff, fleeing from the cinema, only 30 minutes into this 90-minute movie.
