An interview with novelist Alaa el-Aswani, the author of the best-selling novel "The Yacoubian Building", which has been made into a movie, by Associated Press, in Cairo, Egypt.

It's an odd choice for Egyptian popular entertainment: a bleak movie about corruption, torture and political stagnation in a country where cinematic happy endings are the norm. But audiences are packing the theaters. 

The crowds are going to see ''The Yacoubian Building'' both for the cast of all-star Egyptian actors and because the unusually in-your-face criticism of the government has struck a chord. In one scene, a police officer calmly tells a young man he's about to be tortured. Behind the officer, a portrait of President Hosni Mubarak hangs prominently on the police station wall — an unsubtle hint at the blind eye that the government has often turned toward police abuses.

''I didn't expect it to be welcomed this way by the Egyptian audience as it's very different from the comedies that attract average Egyptians.

The movie is full of taboos and controversial issues,'' said the film's director, Marwan Hamed. ''Many in the cinema industry thought it wouldn't be popular among ordinary audiences because it's not an optimistic movie.''

The production, the most expensive ever in Egypt at $4 million, also has won praise abroad. It was named best movie at July's Arab World Film Festival in Paris and was shown at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals. At New York's Tribeca Film Festival, Hamed was judged best new filmmaker in the narrative category.

''The Yacoubian Building'' is based on a best-selling novel by Alaa el-Aswani, a dentist turned author. It tells the stories of several disparate characters linked because they all live in the grand and decrepit early 20th century building of the title, a symbol of a bygone golden age in Egypt.

The building was named for an Armenian-Egyptian businessman who built it in the 1930s, before the government's turn to socialism chased off the foreigners who once invigorated Egypt's business life and the growing trend toward fundamentalist Islam killed off liberal social attitudes. El-Aswani has said that in his novel, ''The building represents the social history of Egypt.''

 Each of the several plots in the movie depicts an aspect of the county's decline.

The poor young man in the police station is raped by his interrogators and turns to Islamic extremism. A corrupt businessman buys a parliament seat, deals drugs and forces his secret, second wife to have an abortion. A young woman has to endure her boss' sexual advances to keep her job as she dreams of leaving Egypt.