The Yacoubian Building, 2006
This week's post will be a little short. I didn't watch many films and got a little bogged down.
The Yacoubian Building is an adaptation of the Alaa al-Aswany book of the same name. The film follows the residents of a slowly decaying building in Cairo. Each resident stands in for different parts of Egyptian society during the era of the first Gulf War. Zaki (Adel Imam) and Hatim (Khaled el Sawy) represent the educated upper-class, Taha (Mohamed Imam) and Bosaina (Hind Sabri) as young Egypt, and Hajj Azzam (Nour El Sharif) as the nominally religious political climber. As the film progresses, each resident of the building struggles to survive in his or her life. All the residents are forced into positions where they must compromise their morals or behave against their codes. Al-Aswany presented a world where society gave them choices of poverty or corruption, and a Cairo where powerful people abused the powerless but all were abused by someone.
The film's boldness is best understood in the context of Egyptian life. The novel was popular with certain Egyptians, but low literacy rates meant few people would ever access the material. Putting the book into film expanded the audience but introduced people to controversial concepts. Hajj Azzam's religious hypocrisy and political corruption could be viewed as an attack on the mosque and state. Taha's failure to rise, torture at the hands of police, and change to Islamist fighter claims the state's repression of certain classes and people creates the very terrorism the state wants to stop. Zaki's flirting and skirt-chasing (the sex is always concealed and implied) is soundly punished in the narrative, but the more illicit sex was Hatim's homosexuality.
Hatim's homosexuality was one of the hardest things the novel and book confronted. The film made the choice to avoid talking about a gay bar directly, but Hatim's sexual relationship with a young police officer remains in the film. Critics have indicated that making Hatim half-French was a way of implying that homosexuality was foreign, but the other aspect is the class dynamics involved in the film. Unlike the book, which implies the young officer has desires of his own that are part of his relationship with Hatim, the film argues that Hatim seduces the young officer and then uses his wealth to persuade and coerce a continuation of their relationship. Director Marwan Hamed said, "Ala Aswani was very honest with his characters - he was not judgmental at all. Hatim's moral failing wasn't his homosexuality but his taking advantage of a poor person to satisfy his desires. Because a novel conveys the inner lives of characters more easily than film, the presentation choices made Hatim's class-based failing more obvious.
The translation from book to film felt clunky at times. Long speeches and exposition, handled well in the book, seem out of place in the film. Adel Imam delivers a great speech about the decline of Egypt from cosmopolitan city to decayed shadow, but other actors fail to make the political statements from the book seem natural. Hamed directs the actors in a way better suited for television than film, and the film has the feeling of an expansive television series. After the film's wild success (it was record-shattering when it debuted in Egypt), a television series based on the book came and scaled back the grandeur (and homosexuality). Aswany's work delivered to the masses made him more popular in Egypt and gave him a voice in the recent revolution (subscription required), and one can see his politics in the novel and film. Much like Atlas Shrugged, the characters in this film articulate the author's political views. Although the speeches can seem pedantic to American audiences, the direct accusations in the speeches are powerful for Egyptian audiences.
Watch this film for its importance to the world of Arab cinema. However, be prepared to be a little confused because the film assumes the audience is familiar with Egyptian life.
Other films:
Election: 1999
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