Released in 2006, and presented at the Berlin Film festival, the Egyptian film 'The Yacoubian Building' is currently available for rental as a video. L. and I watched it on Sunday, and unlike those European 'snob' films I bring home which she claims are unwatchable, she actually sat through the whole 2:30 hours of it. I, on the other hand, trekked to the kitchen a few times.
Who is one supposed to root for in all this, and why? The female characters at the beginning are difficult to keep apart: everyone has identical jet black hair and heavy make-up. The males are all old and sex-mad and the one youngish hero gets totalled in a terrorist attack. Indeed the homosexual newspaper editor gets murdered, and the old alcoholic gets the girl. Strange and stranger.
Seriously, the film is an Oscar-winner caliber overview of Islamist society which seems to have gone under the radar in popular film culture. The original 2002 novel was written by an older man (born 1957) and made in 2006 by a 30 year old but a combination of the two sensibilities gives a stunning portrait of character and mood. I would have guessed that the film was fairly low-budget but I read it was the highest budgeted film of Egyptian history...Perhaps because the honour roll of Egyptian actors is featured. They are all wonderful.
Here is an excerpt from the novel (Which I am translating from the French, which was translated from the Arabic):
Terrace society is no different than any other popular social group within Egypt: children run barefoot and themselves half-naked, the women spend their days preparing food, and get together to gossip in the sun, where they often fight and exchange the most injurious insults only to, suddenly, reconcile and go back to perfectly cordial relations, as if nothing had transpired. Then they exchange warm and sonorous kisses, even cry, so moved are they and so enamoured. As for the men, they do not attach much importance to feminine quarrels, which they take as proof of their insufficient brains to which the Prophet has alluded, prayer and blessings from God be with him. The men of the terrace spend their days in a rough and merciless battle to insure their subsistence and, at night, they come home aspiring to their three little pleasures: a nourishing and appetizing meal, a little bit of a good smoke, with hashich if available, which they smoke in a pipe, alone or in good company, on the terrace, summer nights. As for the third pleasure, it is that of sex which the inhabitants of the terrace honour in particular. p. 23 Actes Sud, 2006.
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