|
|
|
|
 |
'Bobbos' Premieres at Cairo Opera House
Adel Emam and Yosra's much-anticipated movie "Bobbos" was premiered on Saturday, June 12th, at Cairo Opera House. The movie costars Mai Kassab, Ashraf Abdel Baki,and Yousf Dawoud.
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
The Yacoubian Building: The Best of Youth - Tribeca Review
|
.jpg) The review goes on saying that The Yacoubian Building ..has a lot going for it: It's apparently the most expensive Arabic-language film ever made; it's based on a best-selling novel of the same name which is considered the most widely read work of popular fiction in the contemporary Arab world; it stars Egypt's counterparts to Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise. More importantly, it does the noble service of serving up a plentiful slice of contemporary Egyptian culture, replete with Big Issues such as homosexuality, colonialism, class conflict, secular Islam, terrorism, and female exploitation. But it's still a soap opera - which means that even the meatiest issues tackled within are brushed over with a swoony romantic sheen, which threatens to downgrade the endeavor from ethnographic document to lifestyle porn with a heavily moralistic edge.
The Yacoubian Building, which is an actual building in down town Cairo as the reviewer emphasize .. has become a melting pot for the untitled classes. But through the years, as the facade of the structure decayed, so did the social rankings of its inhabitants, and by the film's present day, the Yacoubian Building has become a melting pot for the untitled classes, with aging Pashas and rising merchants sprinkled throughout the interior, and servants and peasants housed six to room in shacks on the roof.
The reviewer goes on putting the film in parallel with westernized icons as he confesses that familiarity with Egyptian film is just about nil,
It's up on the roof that we find Bosaina, a gorgeous shop girl who must suffer the indignities of sexual harassment to feed her elderly mom and siblings, as well as Taha, the pious son of the building's janitor, with whom she's in love. Down below, most of the action revolves around Zaki, an aging, alcoholic playboy; Hatim, a journalist of French lineage who woos a naive young soldier away from his wife and child; and Azaam, a Horatio Alger sort who learns that though money certainly can buy power, it may not be enough to keep it.
He also describes the film as being
heavily tailored, at least aesthetically, for Western tastes -- which is another way of saying that's it's shot like a Selznick epic, and that with its Altman-lite interwoven narrative, even the most convoluted of its plot convulsions go down easy. There is the occasional snatch of dialogue that doesn't quite translate ("You've brought more men here to sleep than there are members of the El-Wafd party!"), but the filmmakers have undoubtedly attempted to bridge the culture gap between a secular Muslim public and a selective western (ie: American and European arthouse) audience. But ironically, it's that apparent mimicry of the Western soap operatic tone that caused the most confusion for this festivalgoer -- just because it looks like bad American television, doesn't mean it shares bad American television's [a]morality.
On the portrayal, the film the review continues revealing a certain point of view as it sees the film as ..tugging at liberal Western sympathies on issues such as gay rights and female empowerment, only to resolve themselves in either punishment or correction for characters with whose desires we've been asked to sympathise. An interesting effect of this narrative schizophrenia, though, is that no one on screen ends the film as the same person who began it; but in many cases, the characters seem to grow too much. Bosaina begins the film as a beautifully fiery moralist, so enraged that the shop owners she clerks for would expect sexual favors that she's forever quitting jobs; by the end, she's become the beautifully docile wife of a man three times her age, willingly sacrificing both her one true love and any morsel of individuality or independence, for a taste of the good life. We're asked to accept this transition as the right one (in fact, the married couple in question are the only ones allowed anything resembling a happy ending), so it's hard not to feel a bit cheated when the film is so clearly having its socio-progressive cake before not only eating it too, but ultimately smacking its frosting-flecked lips in sanctimonious delight.
|
|
|
