The Yacoubian Building--movie review
May. 21st, 2009 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alonewiththemoonLast night after a two and a half hour journey by public transportation from Kenmore Square to Jamaica Plain back to Arlington, I sat down and did not move for two hours and forty-five minutes to watch The Yacoubian Building, an Egyptian film by director Marwan Hamed with an all-star cast including the luminous Hend Sabri. It is not an easy movie to watch, both for its length and for some very unpleasant things that happen, but I highly recommend it. I gather from my book on Arab popular culture, which I really shall get around to writing about someday, that this was a groundbreaking film in Egyptian cinema for daring to tackle taboo subjects, from the obvious one of homosexuality to less-obvious-to-the-non-Egyptian-viewer taboos regarding religion and politics and gender and sex. The movie is certainly Allegory writ large, as most of the non-comedic, non-musical Egyptian films I've seen tend to be, but with a more fluid moralistic stance than most other Egyptian films I've seen. Each character represents a generation or facet of Egyptian society: the reprobate Pasha living in past glory and dreaming of Paris; the entitled Pasha's sister made greedy by the thoughts of what she ought to be owed; the poor, hardworking young man who wants to better his lot in life but is held back by society's judgment of his background; the cultured newspaper editor who must hide his homosexuality from the world and risks everything to try to find love; the country boy Saidi soldier who is astonished to discover the life his looks can buy him; the bourgeois businessman who thinks his show of religiosity can buy him everything he wants in life; the lower class schemers out to exploit the upper classes any way they can; the imam who preys on the poor to find individuals to carry out the violent plots he is too cowardly to carry out himself; the crooked politician/thug; the brutal policeman; and the character I saw as central to the film, the young woman struggling in a society that accepts casual molestation as a fact of life, yet judges women harshly for being its victims. Most of them live in or on the Yacoubian Building, which, of course, is a metaphor for Egypt itself, a colonial relic groaning at the seams with all the life it contains. Ultimately, the reprobate Pasha and the young woman together represent a certain hope for Egypt, because that older, more educated generation with its European fixation can understand the younger generation's wish to be free of some of the constraints of hypocritical Egyptian social norms, while the younger generation at the same time does want to be upright and good in accordance with Islamic values but cannot be, in the face of some of those norms. Also, sex is dangerous and nearly always politically fraught, no matter which character is pursuing it.
Although the characters are clearly representations of social groups, the talented cast makes you care about each of them as individuals--well, maybe not the politician and the policeman and the imam, but the rest of them, certainly, even as some of them make some very bad decisions. One can see very clearly how they get sucked into circumstances that appear to be beyond their control and do things that they never would have thought themselves capable of. At the same time, certain of the characters recognize that one always does have some measure of control, and that paths can be changed if one is strong enough. Some of the brutality is difficult to watch--really, it's tame by Western film standards, but in the context of an Egyptian film, some scenes are very shocking, and others are shocking in any context--but I will say the film ends on a note of hope, so as not to discourage anyone from seeing the film. Highly recommended.
And because I have to find something relevant to belly dance in any Egyptian film I watch, I note that I now understand the cultural context of Yasmina of Cairo's rooftop baladi performance--there are entire small villages on top of the large buildings of Cairo where the working class poor/immigrants from the countryside live, and where laundries are frequently located.
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Although the characters are clearly representations of social groups, the talented cast makes you care about each of them as individuals--well, maybe not the politician and the policeman and the imam, but the rest of them, certainly, even as some of them make some very bad decisions. One can see very clearly how they get sucked into circumstances that appear to be beyond their control and do things that they never would have thought themselves capable of. At the same time, certain of the characters recognize that one always does have some measure of control, and that paths can be changed if one is strong enough. Some of the brutality is difficult to watch--really, it's tame by Western film standards, but in the context of an Egyptian film, some scenes are very shocking, and others are shocking in any context--but I will say the film ends on a note of hope, so as not to discourage anyone from seeing the film. Highly recommended.
And because I have to find something relevant to belly dance in any Egyptian film I watch, I note that I now understand the cultural context of Yasmina of Cairo's rooftop baladi performance--there are entire small villages on top of the large buildings of Cairo where the working class poor/immigrants from the countryside live, and where laundries are frequently located.
.
