To balance the scales

In becoming a star vehicle The Yacoubian Building has lost much of its bite, writes Mohamed El-Assyouti

Alaa El-Aswani's novel 'Imaret Ya'koubian ( The Yacoubian Building ) became an instant bestseller. It has already gone through some seven editions and has been translated into six languages, with eight more translations underway. The film rights were quickly snapped up by scriptwriter Wahid Hamed, and the project became his son Marwan's directorial debut. It is also the Good News Film and Music Company's first production, commanding the biggest budget in Egyptian film history.

El-Aswani's diagnosis of Egyptian life over half a century includes moral decadence, political corruption, growing poverty rates and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism. And in adapting the novel for the screen the characters become embodiments of these maladies, as well as the vehicles to explain them.

Zaki Abdel-Aal El-Dessouqi (Adel Imam) is the son of a pasha, a former minister, the scion of an aristocratic family. He spent much of his youth in Paris. At 65 he continues to live off his inheritance, a drunkard who is obsessed with women and who ends up being robbed by a prostitute. Yet it is El-Dessouqi who saves the orphaned shop assistant Buthaina (Hind Sabri) by marrying her. Though he does not doubt he is a sinner he has hope in God's mercy, and strives never to hurt anyone but himself. At least half of the film's 165 minutes are dedicated to this character, played by superstar Imam, and the script makes no bones about the fact that, whatever El-Dessouqi's faults, he is the good guy of this story.

Hajj Mohamed Azzam (Nour El-Sherif) acts as a sort of foil for El-Dessouqi. Beginning life as a humble shoeshine, he is now a wealthy drug dealer, the owner of several smart shoe shops and automobile agencies. Seeking to secure the monopoly import agency of a major Japanese car manufacturer, he pays government minister Kamal El-Fouli (Khaled Saleh) LE1 million in order to guarantee his election to parliament. Later he has to pay LE100 million a year in bribes to ensure that his automobile and drug businesses do not become the subject of investigations. Like El-Dessouqi, he has a taste for intoxicants, but hashish not alcohol, since he believes hashish is permitted by God. He also enjoys the company of women, and secretly marries the veiled widow Soad (Somaya El-Khashab), whose husband was killed in Iraq. But he forbids her to see her six-year-old son, and insists she must not get pregnant. When she does, he hires a group of thugs to force her to have an abortion.

Hajj Azzam may observe all the Muslim rituals, but he is insidiously evil, and the poor are his victims as he pursues wealth and power, though in the end he too becomes pawn to the corrupt politicians.

Over the last two decades El-Sherif has been a TV rather than film star. Tellingly, he gets half the screen time allocated to Imam. These two characters, played by the biggest names in a glittering cast, are simple variations of the kind of roles both actors have made their own. The playboy with a heart of gold is a character Imam has played in several films while in Hajj Azzam El-Sherif finds an extension of the roles he has played in some of the most popular Ramadan serials. Both, then, are cast within their existing screen personae.

Taha El-Shazli (Mohamed Imam) is the son of the doorman who is refused entry to the Police Academy because of his low social status. His reaction is to turn towards religious fundamentalism. Following his torture and rape by the police he undergoes terrorist training. The character intended to embody the impact of corruption on the downtrodden poor is given as much screen time as Azzam. The cinema debut of Adel Imam's son, El-Shazli is the character that undergoes the most dramatic transformation. Imam junior's performance was unfortunately weak in a role that demanded some experience in front of a camera.

Hatim El-Rashidi (Khaled El-Sawi) is a well- known journalist whose homosexuality is an open secret. He uses his wealth and position to lure a police soldier Abd Rabu (Basim Samra) into a relationship. The soldier brings his wife and child to live on the roof of the building. This storyline is allocated the least screen time, though the 12 or so scenes involving El-Sawi and Samra boast the best performances in the film, and constitute a break with Egyptian cinema's taboo on homosexuality. El-Dessouqi provides one of the film's few laughs when he calls Abd Rabu "a tiger, making an amazing sprint up the stairs". In the film's only flashback, an attempt is made to explain El-Rashidi's homosexuality as the result of his being molested as a child.

Another set of characters represents the Christian minority. Singer Christine (Yousra) and lawyer Fikri Abdel-Shaheed (Youssef Dawoud) are El-Dessouqi's life-long friends, the former having once been his lover -- another taboo broached obliquely. By contrast El-Dessouqi's servant Fanous (Ahmed Ratib), and his brother, the tailor Malak Armanious (Ahmed Bedeir, in a superb Shylock- like performance), try to take revenge on the society in which they find themselves a poor minority by scheming to take over El-Dessouqi's flat, allying themselves with his El-Dessouqi's sister Dawlat (Isaad Younis).

Talal, the Syrian store owner for whom Buthaina works, pays his assistants for sexual favours. He joins El-Dessouqi, Azzam and El-Rashidi in illustrating how sexual exchange is commodified. Yet it is El-Dessouqi who is condemned by society because he pays prostitutes rather than buying a wife, or abusing his employees. El-Shazli's marriage is arranged by the terrorist cell he joins as a way of ensuring his loyalty. Yet of all these it is El-Dessouqi who is the one capable of loving, both in the past -- Christine -- and present -- Buthaina.

El-Dessouqi, who calls himself the "last respectable man" in one scene, is also the only one incapable of harming others. He refuses to take his lawyer's advice and hire thugs to evict his sister from the flat she has connived to deprive him of, since as the son of a pasha he believes he must behave with decency. Given the moral superiority he is granted in the script, El-Dessouqi has licence to judge the others. Not only does he call a spade a spade -- using terms like "prostitute", "pimp", "tiger" -- he pretends descent from the most noble origins.

Azzam, a who once shined shoes but is now a billionaire, is automatically corrupt. Dawlat is "evil" because she once led a promiscuous life and now that she is getting old is too bitter to let her brother live in peace. El-Dessouqi's joke about El-Rashidi's homosexuality -- similar to a scene in Al-Irhab wal Kebab (Terrorism and Kebab, 1992) also written by Hamid -- seems to have been included to reassure the audience that the star has not softened his homophobia.

Not only is Imam's character the good guy in this world, he is also the one to be redeemed. El-Dessouqi speaks to God while drunk in one scene, recalling Adli (Mahmoud Hemeida) praying in a speech to a high-angle camera in Osama Fawzi's Bahib El-Sima (I Love Cinema, 2004). El-Dessouqi is to have a 20 to 100 per cent discount on his sins because God is "Forgiving and Merciful".

Certainly the film appears to pass moral judgments. Abd Rabu is punished by fate when his son Wael dies, so deserts El-Rashidi. The latter, abandoned, picks up a young man from the street who murders him.

The corrupt MP Azzam, who victimises the poor widow he has married, is blackmailed by the corrupt government represented by El-Fouli. The vendetta between the Islamic fundamentalists and the police forces continues as El-Shazli and the policeman who was responsible for his torture and rape kill one another. What goes around comes around. But not quite. As the narrator, Yehia El-Fakharani, makes clear in the opening scene, the film depicts events and characters from 1995. Parliamentarians and ministers like Azzam and El-Fouli, then, are long gone, replaced by less obviously corrupt ones, less fat and with better hair styles.

The film seems at times to want it both ways -- corruption is dead, long live corruption. For the new corrupt can at least boast of their tolerance and democratic values by allowing the release of such a film, while the public can vent their anger on fictional rather than real characters.

The script's choice of condemning corruption in the fictional world may hide an agenda of allying itself with corruption in reality. After all, we can take Minister El-Fouli's hints that he is only a messenger representing a group as a mere bluff, since we never see any other corrupt minister or official. So with the real El-Fouli removed, the government is corruption free.

The four main storylines hardly ever intersect and the shifts from one storyline to another seem arbitrary. That the protagonists inhibit the same building is often the only dramatic justification for following their different fates. Director Marwan Hamid, cinematographer Samih Selim, art director Fawzi El-Awamri, costume designer Nahid Nasrallah and editor Khaled Maari all excelled in their respective departments. There is enough work in the film to make it more than the sum of its news headline- like storylines and soap opera narratives. It is close to director Salah Abu Seif's best moral tales based on Naguib Mahfouz novels.

Yet the price of bringing a novel like The Yacoubian Building to the screen is high. Having cost LE30 million, the producer Good News, headed by media mogul Emadeddin Adib, would have done everything possible to guarantee revenues. No risks were taken as far as letting any messages miss their mark, and it was inevitable that the film would become a star vehicle. While overstatement in journalism is sometimes necessary, in a big budget cinema it is indispensable.

Perhaps the most damaging compromise, allowing the film to become a vehicle for Imam and his son, was necessary for it to be made in the first place. The audience might remember Imam's adventures as El-Dessouqi, and his speeches about the negative changes faced by both the Yacoubian building and the country. But these are simply replays of scenes and lines seen and heard in tens of earlier films. They are yet one more episode in the redundant Imam serial. While this might save the biggest budget Egyptian film yet at the box office, in terms of artistic merit it was a huge price to pay.