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Sukoot Hansawar (Silence, We're rolling!)... or (Quiet on the Set)
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Starring: Latifa, Ahmed Bedier, Ahmed Wafiq, Magda Al-Kahteeb, Ruby
Directed by: Youssef Chahine
The cairolive.com rating: 6 (out of 10)
Youssef Chahine's global reach is well known. His current film -- Silence, We're Rolling! -- has already screened at this year's New York Film Festival. As such, it's nice that he begins the
film with a tribute to Egypt. "Tibqa Inta Akeed El-Masri" (You're Certainly The Egyptian), composed by Omar Khayrat and sung by Latifa, is a catchy tune extolling the virtues of
the average Egyptian. It also features stills of Egyptian heros like Naguib Mahfouz and Ahmed Zewail.
It's fitting that a Tunisian singer like Latifa sings the song. Latifa -- who plays the film's star, an Um Kulthum-like character named Malak -- is decked out in an impressive yellow
dress,
performing the song at the Opera House, where, completely unrealistically, she steps down into and engages the audience, which includes Chahine favorites Hani Salama
and Hanan Turk in cameo scenes.
But this is definitely not a film about reality. The song is nice, and Latifa has a great voice, and that's all that matters.
Five minutes into the film, Chahine has already introduced a complex web of love and betrayal. Jean-Jacques Lamei -- an impoverished imposter -- pretends to love Malak, who
falls for it big-time. Her daughter Paula (played by Ruby), on the other hand, is in love with the driver's son Nasser, a magisterial candidate who loves her for real and not for her money.
To seal Paula and Nasser's engagement, Malak's mother (played by Magda Al-Kahteeb) invites everybody to a fancy "sharkassia" dinner at the family palace. But when
Malak's director (played by real-life director Zaki Fateen Abdel-Wahab) and scriptwriter (played by Ahmed Bedier) see through Lamei's false advances towards Malak, the dinner turns into a
fiasco, accompanied by a few minutes of good dialogue about cinema, and dedication to a career path.
Malak, a big star remniscient of Warda or Um Kulthum, is supposed to be dowdy and vulnerable. Chahine seems to be trying to show how stardom can be both alienating and
lonely. Her suitor, Lamei, is a weird guy with yellow highlights in his hair -- clearly distasteful but somewhow attractive to the insecure Malak.
Chahine seems to be trying to say something important about art and fame, wealth and poverty, Egypt and history -- but what is it?
The scene where Malak finally introduces Lamei -- who claims to want to be a star -- to the public at a concert in Marina -- is very well done. Lamei, dressed in black with a
yellow handkerchief wrapped around his neck, ends up taking over the concert after Malak is forced to leave because her mother is ill. Chahine attempts, and nearly suceeds, at presenting
a perfect cinematic metaphor for the decline of taste in Egypt, as Lamei's shabby, shababi songs with silly lyrics replace Malak's elegant singing. As Malak is away tending to her dying
mother -- and singing her a final ode -- the audience at Marina gets up on stage to dance and high five with the clownish Lamei. The members of the orchestra look at their instruments,
realize they've become useless and redundant in this noisy atmosphere, and pack up to go. Lamei's transformation of the elegant concert into a "maskhara" (farce) is Chahine's way of
trying to say that Egyptian pop culture has become a farce as well. "Take away" (the name of Lamei's song) has replaced Um Kulthum.
But then again, Chahine himself is playing with the take away crowd here. The cartoon scenes where Bedier's eyes pop out a la Roger Rabbit, and some awful special effects in
a waterskiing scene, seem to be Chahine saying, "See, I can be fun too." But since it's all done with a heavy hand, it also reveals the director's distaste for this sort of thing. These
scenes -- and others -- are bathed in a total un-Chahine-like silliness inspiring viewers to wonder whether Chahine -- usually a perfectionist -- intended the poor quality special effects
or not.
This is a film about fine lines, the ones between cheese and brilliance...
When he finds out that the family fortune is going to the daughter instead of the mother, Lamei tries to romance Paula, telling her the same thing he told her mom -- "The way you peel shrimp, the way
you search for the caviar in the crabs... It's like poetry ... music..."
The funny thing is that Bedier, a serious scriptwriter who is simultaneously writing a script that is based on Malak's ludicrous affair -- actually ends up using Lamei's line
about "poetry ... music " in "real life". In other words, though he hates the cheesiness of it, Lamei's wave is hard to resist.
Sometimes it looks like Sukoot Hansawar is the work of a first time director trying to do and say too much... at other times it's clear that an old master is playing with us...
In Chahine's last few films, the director had become very heavy-handed -- rhetorical and silly. Here, he keeps the silly but masks the heavy handedness in plot devices more
remniscent of the light-hearted Youssef Wahby classic "Isha'it Hob" (A Rumour of Love) rather than Doestoevsky.
Who knows? Maybe, just like Isha'it Hob, in twenty or thirty years this will be one of those films we don't mind watching on TV over and over again.
September 10, 2001
Showing at:
Salam, Wonderland, Serag, Odeon
Did you like this article? Send your comments to comments@cairolive.com
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