Sap and Censorship

Rarely does an Egyptian movie sound not-ridiculous enough to tempt Aaron and me to try it out. Most advertise their absurdity with garish pride: chaotic and impassioned collages on posters promise hours of slapstick comedy and mawkish love stories. Two so far have somehow penetrated our firewall however, only to turn out equally preposterous.

We suffered our first hoodwinking with Halim, the biographical film of one of Egypt’s most beloved musical stars, Abdel Halim Hafez. Our appreciation for his music and interest in the historical period his life encompassed convinced us that the film, however schmaltzy, must merit some esteem.

Three and a half hours later, we emerged convinced that Halim was the very worst movie either of us had ever seen.

(below: the real Abdel Halim Hafez)
Halim was to be played by the famous Egyptian actor Ahmed Zaki, but as the latter unfortunately died during the filming, his son completed the role. Consequently the film contained a few rather jarring hops between generations, as well as some disconcerting footage from the late actor’s actual funeral at the tear-jerking conclusion.

For seemingly unrelated reasons, the narrative had been arranged in a puzzling two-part structure. The first half adhered to a saccharine and increasingly familiar narrative of Egyptian history, marking the
most significant moments in Halim’s life as the 1952 Revolution and the 1967 and 1973 Wars. This section provided many golden opportunities to stream nationalist refrains through Halim’s divinely talented lips (this is, in fact, how Halim got famous in the first place). The second half then rewound time and retraced it along the peaks and pitfalls of Halim’s tortured love life. None of the aristocratic girls he went after could stoop to marrying a mere musician, but all entertained many a passionate encounter with the dreamy songster before rejecting him in the end (or standing by complicit to their fathers’ rejections). Egypt's national treasure dies corrupted by disappointment and drug addiction. Ya lil-‘aar!

Our second cinematic deception occurred just last night when an online review piqued our interest: Dunya, in which Hanan Turk, the recently withdrawn Egyptian superstar, plays a belly dancer/poet getting a degree in Sufi literature. We have not yet met any Egyptian girls like this. Are intrigued. “Tackles such universal issues as female circumcision,” the blurb added. Unheard of. “Really?” I exclaimed. “Universal?” Aaron grimaced. We were hooked.

(below: the radiant MM)

Apparently these “universal issues” did not hold universal appeal for Egyptians; Aaron and I had the theater to ourselves. Hanan Turk appeared on the screen, competing in a dance competition while her adoring teacher watches from the wings with a male companion: none other than “the voice of Egypt” (this prefaced his name in the opening credits) Mohamed Mounir. I was delighted, since one of Mounir’s sunny anthems enjoyed a brief reign as my Favorite Song this summer (Alb Fadi). The daughter of a legendary dancer, young Dunya refuses to dance for the judges, but instead submits them to her performance poetry, in which she curls up on the floor and claims never to have seen herself naked. Hmm. Very modern. Very Soilent Green.

From here characters of vague relation to the heroine make disjointed appearances that defy plot progression: a spunky female taxi driver (never before seen in Cairo) seems to be a close friend; Mohamed Mounir plays a famous professor of classical Arabic literature with whom Dunya has begun a study of ecstasy in Sufi poetry – sexual tension abounds; a handsome boyfriend who follows Dunya around, unperturbed by her cold – although constantly and atypically exposed – shoulder; a matriarchy living in her building, composed of a saucy single mother refuses to obey the traditional grandmother hell-bent on circumcising precocious granddaughter; Dunya’s flamboyant male dance teacher, also the teacher of her much-invoked absent mother.

After the first forty-five minutes of sap we realize that things are only getting worse. Our initial confusion regarding the relationships between these personalities was not to be alleviated, but rather complicated further. Scenes threatening illumination broke off at inexplicable junctures, giving way to cryptic, sensual interludes, often between characters with no other perceptible function in the film. As this (at best) impressionistic structure soon succeeded in thwarting our attempts to make sense of the plot, we resigned ourselves to appreciating the sheer ludicrousness of the film’s collaged fragments. I shall provide here two of the most memorable.

First the funny.

Dunya’s dance teacher may be the most barefacedly gay Egyptian I have ever seen on the screen. Petite and wiry, he wears a svelte silver and black leotard-like number and a modish coiffure, featuring highlighted, side-parted wisps. He looks like a mod elf. He clips out meticulous orders and manipulates his student’s limbs with fastidiousness, but even his painstaking efforts cannot make Hanan Turk a good dancer (although she is acclaimed as such in the film). Aaron and I wonder how an Egyptian audience would react to this elephant in the room: was Hanan famous enough to star in a dancing movie despite her wooden, anemic interpretations of moves I have seen better rendered by Jane Doe? It would seem so -- “artistic” shots of her bland gyrations add a good half hour to the already mercilessly long film. Dunya should have stuck with performance poetry. At least then she would not have such obvious superiors amongst us most Egyptian women; in fact, she would probably have no competition at all.

Somewhere in the second half of the movie, we find ourselves in the stadium-sized dance studio. Dunya is getting yet another earful from her instructor. As he caresses her delicate jawbone to punctuate his severe but breathy encouragement, a street child appears out of nowhere with a bouquet of red roses. The teacher takes one and thrusts it into his charge’s ever-dreamy face (she tends to field his slings and arrows in pouty, pensive silence).

“You aren’t dancing with feeling, my dear . . . You must smell the rose, and feel!” he commands as she leans in, eyelids fluttering, lips trembling. Seizing the moment, he ups the ante:
“Eat the rose!” he hisses. “Eat it, and become your true self!”

After a moment’s hesitation, the demure Dunya bites the unlucky flower with startling, if kitten-like, ferocity.

I couldn’t fucking believe it. She ate the rose.

Cut to another scene. No further mention or instance of flower-eating.

Now the tragic.

Scheming Grandma has at last managed to spirit away the unlucky little girl and croons to her as their meaningful guest, a middle-aged woman in full black wrap and burka, sets up shop on the floor. Grandma is to have her way at last: “Come along, my lovely, we’re just going to take off a little piece of skin that you don’t need anyway . . .” The girl whimpers and cowers, and rightly so: we watch in shock as the sinister midwife brandishes a razor and reaches to spread her patient’s trembling legs. They cannot show this. They cannot show this. Egypt is not ready for this. I am not ready for this.

They do not show it: the scene cuts away just before the crucial moment, and we find ourselves in the stairwell with Dunya listening to the child’s screams. Our heroine’s feminine intuition alerts her to the cause and she bursts into the macabre apartment, where the little girl lies in a faint next to a bloody towel. Dunya accuses the treacherous grandmother of ruining the girl’s life: “You extinguished her – now she’ll be cold forever!” I gather from this that Dunya must have suffered a similar operation as a child, on which she now seems to be blaming her nonexistent sexual appetite.

Tearful scenes follow, in which the girl’s mother clutches her bereft daughter weeping, “Now you are just like me, my dearest . . . How I hoped for you to turn out better than I . . . !” This event has galvanized Dunya into action, however: she goes straight to Professor Mounir to awaken her sexual potency at last. This, I presume, is meant to be our happy ending, although we do not witness the consummation. For all its daring, the film resorts to the traditional replacement for sex scenes in Arabic movies: yet another endless dance number, performed by the incompetent Hanan Turk herself.

Forget it, Hanan.

Despite our initial infuriation over having wasted our time and money on a second nonsensical film, our overarching judgment of Dunya was “silly.” However, I later discovered that it had incited a fair amount of serious dispute in Egypt. It took Lebanese filmmaker Jocelyne Saab a year even to obtain permission to film this controversial screenplay, which she achieved only when high-profile campaigners supporting women's rights intervened. Then, like Da Vinci Code (Shafrit da Vinci), after having been advertised the film was banned from Egyptian theaters. According to Al-Ahram Weekly, an Egyptian English language newspaper, the director of the Egyptian Censorship Bureau Ali Abu Shadi denied that the film had been banned because of content, although he had requested that Saab remove the circumcision scene. To make matters worse, Dunya turned out to be Hanan Turk’s last film before she took the veil, after which she may well have attempted to prevent screenings of all films in which she had appeared unveiled.

When Dunya was banned from the 2005 Cairo Film Festival despite its international acclaim, it sparked a lively debate between the film’s supporters and detractors. The most problematic element for most was not the film’s insistent and even to my brash American sensibilities vulgar sensual scenes; Egyptian audiences have long since numbed themselves to such displays due to the ubiquity of raunchy music videos, despite the absence of any such suggestive seductresses in their actual lives. But the vast majority objected to the scene depicting khitaan al-anaath, or female circumcision. Some deny the prevalence of female circumcision in Egypt (some estimates postulate upwards of 70% of Egyptian women have been mutilated, although to varying degrees)) and see the scene as an exaggeration; others regard al-khitaan as a private matter and thus balk at such blunt representations. But even those who believe that the issue is pressing and should be addressed publicly objected to a Lebanese director doing it. Here in Egypt, it is indeed possible to succeed in pleasing no one all of the time.

In the midst of all this hullaballoo, I am not sure how Aaron and I managed to clap eyes on the daring Dunya. Although it had been marked "adults only," no one at the Nile City Renaissance Theater warned us. In retrospect, I wish they would have. I mean really, no one should be watching that movie. For so many reasons. One would think, of course, that a banned film would have attracted a larger audience. I suppose I am thus obliged to congratulate our fellow Cairenes for knowing better.

Never thought I would end up siding with the Censorship Board; but based on my experiences in Egyptian cinema thus far, it may not be the last time.