blueprint |ˈblo͞oˌprint|
noun
a design plan or other technical drawing.
• something that acts as a plan, model, or template: a vague blueprint for fundamental land redistribution.
verb [ with obj. ]
draw up (a plan or model): (as adj. blueprinted) : a neatly blueprinted scheme.
ORIGIN late 19th cent.: from the original process in which prints were composed of white lines on a blue ground or of blue lines on a white ground.
Interviewed byYoussef Rakha
On the threshold of the millennium Youssef Chahine, Egypt‘s most out-spoken film-maker, could hardly have remained silent. But the voice in which he communicates his message is even louder this time.
In his unashamedly topical thriller, Al-Aakhar (The Other), the new world order takes on disastrously ominous dimensions as a group of rapacious Egyptian and American businessmen, in inexplicable liaison with religious extremists throughout the world, go about collecting funds to build a religious complex in the Sinai where Christians, Muslims and Jews can coexist in peace — perhaps an oblique reference to Sadat’s unfinished project of the 1980s. Meanwhile a love story has developed between Adam (Hani Salama) — the son of an Egyptian businessman and his American wife, Margret (Nabila Ebeid) — and Hanan (Hanan Tourk), a struggling young journalist intent on exposing the corruption and injustice which besets the system. The businessmen’s undertaking, of course, turns out to be a sham, and the evils of unmoderated privatisation are eventually revealed for what they are, but not until the film reveals its own possible shortcomings.
Unlike Chahine’s last two features, Al-Mohagir (The Emigrant, his biggest box-office success to date) and Al-Masir (Destiny), Al-Aakhar tackles current issues head-on, rather than dressing them in biblical or historical garb. Yet here too the plot is bafflingly elaborate, favouring dramatic intensity over credibility; the characters are nearer abstract types than human individuals; the good and evil camps are too clearly demarcated; and scenes depicting the two young protagonists’ ill-fated love are by turns melodramatic and sentimental. Chahine seems to have been employing the perfect formula for plebeian, if not altogether pedestrian, entertainment. The results are gripping, often amusing morality tales, but they offer neither the aesthetic wholeness nor the intellectual excitement to be expected from modern Arab cinema’s most celebrated agent provocateur.
Despite continuing success worldwide — after receiving Cannes’ prix du cinquantieme in 1997, Chahine chose not to participate in the official competition this year, so as not to compete with younger directors — one wonders whether his seemingly obsessive concern with current political and economic questions, the urge “to live in my time”, is ultimately justified from an artistic perspective.
His disarming charisma aside, the 73-year-old director finds the questions posed by “modernity” not only justified, however, but inevitable: “You tell me is this your business or not. Of course it’s my business. I’m talking about human beings. If you are talking about people who are living with you at the time you are creating some kind of work, then the whole context must be included… All that happens politically and economically influences me socially… psychologically, influences how I make love in bed.
 
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| Despite the positive tone in which he talks about Arab cinema in Cannes, Youssef Chahine’s 1997 contribution to the official competition, Al-Masir, failed to glean the much coveted Palme d’Or |
“Basically I’m doing drama, but the drama cannot be detached from reality. And the dosage is very, very difficult. Sometimes there are things that I want to get rid of quickly because I’m scared they might overpower the drama. When I learn more, I will be better at proportions, but I’m still learning and that’s the truth of it. It’s very hard, when you want to make drama, and you have a position that you want to expound. Sometimes maybe I rush into things, the way we’re all rushing into globalisation right now without really understanding what it means. But it’s the drama that makes you sit and watch. You want to know what will happen next, the boy and the girl, the love story…
“Maybe I could have been a little bit more subtle but there is always the fear of not being understood. You mustn’t forget that you have 80 per cent illiteracy. I mean, I love you very much, but still I want to try and talk to more people. You’ll remember when people were saying that Joe is being cryptic and nobody understands him — this was a battle against me. And I don’t want to reach the stage where I don’t find the funds necessary to do my work.
“Cinema is a popular art, and the American school in which I grew up stresses the entertainment value of the work. But to what extent you should be subtle — it depends. I am trying my best. The point is to balance your proportions, so that people will understand where the catastrophe is coming from, and there is no catastrophe that doesn’t have political and economic colour.
“For globalisation to work here certain economic and social conditions must obtain. That we have traditions and conventions going back seven thousand years — and I don’t say this in a jingoistic way — doesn’t mean that we are chauvinistic. Culturally we are different, even physically we are different. And our specificity is what’s delicious about us. So America can’t come and tell me you have to be like me. Rather, it should say that we want to cooperate in a way that lets me retain what’s particularly attractive about me. I mean, I’m all for the businessmen, I’m all for globalisation, but I also want to know how to limit it, how to protect myself.”
Indeed the downside of an increasingly market-oriented society — which Chahine’s own production company, Misr International, has had to confront — gives his (often comic) depiction of brusque businessmen, committed journalists and sincere employees being made redundant an unforeseen autobiographical dimension. Two telling encounters had prompted Chahine to embark on his project. First, he saw a businessman furiously banging the table and roaring, “I pay, therefore I tell you what to do.” Second, one of the many economists he consulted assured him that the country was in mint condition, everything was flourishing and there was nothing to complain about.
“I’ve had a company for thirty years, I give chances to new kids to try out their talents. For 30 years I didn’t need anybody to push me, I kept on going to festivals even though sometimes it was military people, and sometimes what they call officials who were in control, and in either case they didn’t know much about cinema. My company was created for about LE14,000 and it did all this over the years — really a lot of pictures on which people worked. I have a hundred families which this company is supporting, and usually they are picked because they really love cinema, and they would suffer for cinema, give something more.
“Now people talk to me about concessions for people who have LE200 million. I don’t even know how many zeros there are in LE200 million. I said maybe they’re talking about two million. It was insane. And I thought, don’t tell me the country is flourishing. Say that a very small part of the country is being favoured…”
But where is “the other” in all this? Chahine’s methods of tackling difference include a guest appearance by Edward Said which, though dramatically unnecessary, summarises the point of the film in straightforward Arabic, with Said arguing against the them-and-us approach to human civilisation and affirming the value of open cultural exchange. “I think that really Professor Said is extremely important for any Arab. When he appears, this might tempt you to read his works. It’s enough that he agreed to it. He is always in a huge confrontation, and the lines that he says are taken from his texts. And besides he was unbelievably sweet. To give us so much of his time and grace the film with his presence…”
Margret, on the other hand, symbolises the American obsession with absolute (political and economic) control, and it is her blindly selfish possessiveness that perpetuates Adam and Hanan’s death at the end. “When you want your hegemony to be absolute, dramatically that’s as if you want to kill your children. Too much control, too much possessiveness — and you feel like saying, what’s wrong with you people, why be the policemen of the world? I don’t hate Margret. But she’s pathetic. She can’t understand that nobody can control everything in a real democracy, which is what we’re striving for…”
Margret’s involvement with a Christian extremist sect, moreover, shifts the emphasis from Islamic extremism (Al-Masir’s principal topic) to Western religious fanaticism. Even the Fayoum mummy portraits, with which she decorates her house, acquire a sinister aspect. “The sects use even Jesus Christ to propagate their lies, they use the Fayoum portraits. And maybe it’s about time that you talk about non-Islamic extremism. But the most I can do is criticise, I am not a judge.”
But where Margret’s computer becomes an agent of international political conspiracy, encoding people’s private lives in microchips and boding such tragedies as the killing of the protagonist’s Algerian friend by extremists almost as soon as he returns to his country, Adam and Hanan’s love remains “the most important thing in the world”.
“What do I want to know about the other? It’s the ways in which he is different. But rather than being fascist, racist, and hating the difference — I find it intriguing. It’s not just a blind mad love. You are different to me, I’m different to you. But maybe that’s what attracts us to each other. And we should teach people that the difference is something attractive.
“I am very sensual. I hate porn but I like eroticism, and it’s very important for me that you get excited while you watch. Love is the best thing in life, so I want to show love, but without offending people’s sensitivities. And it’s not just the physical gestures but people who care. How can you go on talking about love? How can you liberate yourself from all those dreadful repressions that beset you from the very beginning? That’s what the question is for me…
“I’m always surrounded by young people,” Chahine explains. “The kid who writes the screenplays with me, Khaled Youssef, is not yet 30. But I tell him — you’re getting too old for me now and you must be replaced by someone younger. Because that’s the way to know what’s going on, the real problems. So I’m really trying to live in modernity, in my time.”
And living in his time he certainly has been. Now that he has appropriated current issues so fully, though, the question to be asked is what next?
Al-Ahram Weekly, May 1999
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I saw Omar Sharif last weekend. Well, I saw a picture of him. But it made him so present I thought I really did see him. Immediately, the images began to foxtrot through my head: Doctor Zhivago, Sharif’s Ali to Peter O’Toole’s TE Lawrence, mustachioed International Star (as the Egyptian media likes to call him), bearded French TV host, bridge champion, exotic heartthrob but most importantly of all, icon of the marriage, in the course of the 20th century, between the Arab world and the West.
It was a recent picture, part of a full-page ad at the front of Emirates Business 24/7: gracing a new resort development, he stands to one side with manicured green in the background, formally dressed, silver haired and bearded. But his charismatic smile has not changed one bit since he starred in Youssef Chahine’s black-and-white films as a clean-shaven young man, both slimmer and more casual, with a conspicuous “beauty mark” to the right of his nose.
Aside from the momentary nostalgia Sharif’s face always evokes – a nostalgia for 1950s Egyptian cinema and the artistically vibrant, multicultural Egypt it stands for – which, on Abu Dhabi’s Airport Road, is prone to turning into a far cruder nostalgia for every old Egypt, cosmopolitan or not, I would not have given that eminently multinational face so much as another wink.
But the reason I spent all afternoon ruminating on Omar Sharif was the coincidence of seeing him on this particular weekend. It was the second day of the Art for Aid charity exhibition (held at the Cultural Foundation under the auspices of Sheikha Shamsa bint Hamdan Al Nahyan to raise funds for the Red Crescent of the UAE), and I was scheduled to attend a “live interview” with the exhibition’s star guest, the Lady of the Arab Screen, Faten Hamama. For those who don’t know, said Lady was Sharif’s wife from 1955 to 1974.
A live interview, as I was to discover, is practically a talk show episode, but more sober and less brief: the perfect opportunity to raise the big, complicated questions and expect to discuss them at length.
Maybe I thought of Chahine first because, before I could remember the fact, it had subconsciously dawned on me that Chahine’s 1954 Struggle in the Valley was the film in which Faten and Sharif famously, fabulously met.
After years of categorically refusing to be kissed on screen Faten gave in to what was, in context, a relative moral compromise, only to turn round and legitimise the act by marrying the man she had compromised herself with. Even Chahine, who had grown jealously attached to both leads, could not guess what was coming. By his own admission, the marriage was so abrupt and devastating it drove him to (probably half-hearted) suicide. I actually remembered the couple more clearly in River of Love, the 1960 Anna Karenina adaptation directed by Faten’s first husband Ezzeddin Zulfuqar, from whom she had separated while Struggle in the Valley was being filmed.
A stately tragedy full of palatial ballrooms and sumptuous trains: the controversial message of River of Love – that a woman will be unfaithful if she is unhappily married – sets the tone for much of Faten’s work. While Sharif was fast relocating to Hollywood and Chahine, more gradually, to Cannes, she consolidated her local career through roles that spoke to the female predicament: a peasant girl who gets pregnant out of wedlock; another who is the victim of an honour killing; a woman of good family unable to divorce the abusive husband who has marred her life; an otherwise happy wife whose marriage suffers from an insufferably meddlesome mother-in-law; a young woman who proves herself in the legal profession against all odds.
The Lady had always managed to safeguard her reputation while mixing in decadent circles, but the mere fact of her doing so pointed to Egypt’s capacity, all through the 1950s and 1960s, for cosmopolitanism. It seems telling that her divorce from Sharif – the very epitome of such decadence – took place within three years of Anwar Sadat, the self-avowed “Believer President”, coming to power in late 1970.
True, Sadat freed political prisoners as well as the economy, making sensibly pragmatic peace with Israel rather than subjecting his people to yet another war. But in being terrified of “the communists” he not only gradually refilled the prisons but also set off wave after wave of religious fundamentalism; fundamentalists, not communists, would eventually assassinate him.
In making money, not worldliness, the standard of chic, Sadat’s reign ushered in an era of relative insularity that continues to this day; and Faten was in a much better position than either Sharif or Chahine to accommodate the new mores without giving up too many of her principles.
By 4.30pm the space set out for the live interview on the first floor of the Foundation had been quietly filled. Faten’s Emirati hostess was already bringing up topics like whether women should dress to impress their men or for themselves, and whether khul’ – the most recent development in the personal status rights of Muslim women in Egypt – was necessarily a good thing.
Being in large part a modern, televised variation on the traditional Emirati unisex gathering, this was an awkward place for a man. A feast of hors d’oeuvres flanked the lush armchairs that stretched from the Lady’s seat at one end of the space to a screen silently playing footage from her 97-strong filmography at the other. The only males allowed in were journalists and organisers; and a tacit determination to assert girl power pervaded the proceedings.
An interesting way for feminism to find expression in middle-class and segregated settings, this: what it served to demonstrate was just how insular and conservative Arabs have become since Struggle in the Valley. Egged on by no less than a hundred Arab women Faten held forth on a range of subjects. But when talking about the social influence her work has exercised, the Arab woman she consistently invoked was the lowest common denominator – a disappointingly monocultural creature who, even as she complains of patriarchal abuses, does not even conceive of questioning the status quo.
Only some mention of Sharif, I decided, could counter such traditionalism.
So when it was finally my turn to race through a question or two, microphone in hand, I plucked up the courage to mention an ad I had seen on the front page of Emirates Business 24/7. “What,” I began to say, “could the coincidence of Omar Sharif –” when I was abruptly cut short.
Not by Faten, mind you: her face had not lost its composure and, while she did not object to the hostess reminding me of the provision against “personal questions”, it was not clear whether she wanted to respond to the question or not. Before I could push my luck, however, I had already lost her.
The women around Faten were suddenly tut-tutting and shaking their heads; and I could not help thinking that, like so many Arabs now, they were all paragons of an increasinly hermetic culture. A culture which, forgetting that it actually produced them, can only tolerate Omar Sharif and Youssef Chahine as the eccentric remnants of a time or a place sufficiently removed not to be threatening.
Faten had looked imposing at the centre, as fresh, sharp and appealing as she was 20 or 40 years ago. But it was the face of Omar Sharif – icon of the marriage not between himself and Faten Hamama, but between the Arab world and the West – that would stay with me; that I missed.
The National, May 9, 2008
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