Both 'Aquarium' and 'Adhen' focus on small groups to make points about society at large

By Jim Quilty
Daily Star staff

BEIRUT: Though the individual tends to be at the heart of cinema, it's not unusual for film - even auteur film - to turn its cameras on society. A number of Arab filmmakers have released work this year that might be considered aestheticized social commentary. Two particularly accomplished films stand out - "Aquarium," the latest work by Egyptian independent cinema icon Yousry Nasrallah, and "Adhen," the third feature by France-based Algerian writer-director Rabah Ameur Zaimeche. Both films got the nod from major European festivals - "Aquarium" at the Berlinale, "Adhen" at Cannes - and both screened during the Ayam Beirut Cinemaiya festival of independent Arab cinema, which wound up over the weekend.



"Aquarium" sees Nasrallah return to contemporary Cairo, with what might be called a "refusal to come of age" story. The plot apparently focuses on Laila Bakr (Hind Sabri) and Youssef al-Nadi (Amr Waked), a pair of thirtysomething professionals whose lives foil one another, though they've never met.

Laila hosts a successful late-night call-in radio program called "Night Secrets," during which her listeners share their secret obsessions, ranging from conspiracy theories and hypochondria to sexual fetishes and tragedies.

Though pretty and accomplished, Laila still lives with her younger brother (a non-entity) and her mother, a cultivated woman who doesn't approve of Laila's "vile" program - disliking both the way her daughter sounds on air and peoples' need to air their dirty laundry.

Laila is having a peculiar relationship with an older married man. Though his one appearance on screen suggests he's the epitome of sleaze, you are led to believe the relationship is somehow chaste.

Aside from her mother, the only person Laila seems close to is Zakki (Bassem Samra). Her sound technician and co-conspirator in designing the show's sometimes transgressive content, he's in love with Laila and (as if to suggest she ought to grow up a little) encourages her to move into her own flat.

Lopsided emotional development is something Laila and Youssef share. He is an anesthesiologist who works at a hospital in the mornings and operates an illegal abortion clinic with a colleague. As if to reflect the psychic ramifications of how he makes his money, Youssef's life is somewhat more unbalanced than that of Laila.

Though he has his own flat, Youssef never sleeps there, preferring to bed down at night in his black SUV. He is having sexual relations with a beautiful divorcee named Marwa but, though he lets her collect his dry-cleaning and such, he's careful not to let her get too close.

His emotional life is preoccupied by his hospitalized father - and these scenes strongly echo the tone of similar sequences in Elia Suleiman's 2002 film "Divine Intervention." A retired judge, Youssef's father suffers from a ghastly condition that sees bright green slime ooze out of one nostril, through a tube, to a clear plastic collection bag.

Youssef is attentive in his visits with the old man, massaging him daily and ensuring he takes his morphine, but he is emotionally aloof. Not ready to die, the father often expresses his disapproval of his son, complaining about everything from the way he ties his shoes to his diet - compared to fried camel liver, boiled chicken scarcely qualifies as food. This evidently has some impact on the son, who secretly does what his father tells him.

The only thing connecting Laila and Youssef at first is his friend Samir (Tamim Abdou), an older doctor who's obsession is with voices. The preoccupation leads the two doctors to discuss the mysterious Laila Bakr and eventually Youssef himself rings her radio program.

His obsession, he says, is the maze-like garden surrounding the Aquarium nightclub - renowned in Cairo as a space where young people can safely hang out without too much fear - which he circles without ever entering. After speaking to Laila, Youssef does enter the garden, but alone, in order to watch its youthful intimacies.

The film's collection of unrequited and "unnatural" love stories, unconventional lifestyle choices and their ambit of personal indulgences and social dislocation, reiterates certain well-known prototypes of Egyptian popular cinema. There's even a bit of (inadvertently comic) song and dance, when Sabri's character struts her stuff on Aquarium's dance floor, to the accompaniment of a Egyptian hip hop band.

There is an aspect of cosmic inevitability in the manner in which, having sketched their lopsided lives, Nasrallah nudges his two protagonists closer together over a 48-hour period - when Laila accompanies a young friend to Youssef's clinic. To their credit, though, Nasrallah and co-writer Nasser Abdel-Rahmane resist the temptation to thrust the characters into one another's arms, and there are enough contingencies littering Cairo's social landscape to make their future happiness a less than sure thing.

Elevating "Aquarium" above the minimal demands of popular cinema is the success with which the filmmakers find a cinematic language to tell the story of Cairo's disintegrating society. Rather than slavishly accompanying a naturalistic narrative, Samir Bahsan's cinematography bears the main weight of the storytelling.

With public health paranoia such a prominent part of popular urban discourse, the film opens in an anonymous enclosure housing thousands of identical chickens. As the characters stroll the city's streets and Nile bridges, the camera alternatively dodges clusters of Cairene youth engaged in one profane pastime or another, or else assumes an elevated position - high enough to remind you that Youssef and Laila's are merely two of the stories in this sprawling society, close enough to show that society's faces.

This film is "about" Cairo as much as it is its protagonists. While Sabri and Waked occupy their characters alone, the actors portraying the minor figures - Zakki, Marwa, the man who collects payment at Youssef's clinic, the terminally ill young man who resists Youssef's efforts to anesthetize him - step out of their characters, workshop-fashion, to discuss how they understand their characters. The effect is to afford greater complexity to the supporting cast (society, if you like) than the self-indulgent, not always likeable protagonists.

A roster of ambivalent protagonists is something "Aquarium" shares with "Adhen," a film that, apparently at least, couldn't be more different.

The film is set almost exclusively in a factory, specializing in repairing trucks and pallets, at a rundown industrial park somewhere in France. The story, co-written by Zaimeche and Louise Thermes, follows the surprising consequences of what at first glance appears to be an act of benevolence on the part of The Man.

The factory owner, Mao (the director), is a North African Muslim. Evidently he is a self-made man. He has an earthy, no-nonsense relationship with his workers. Several scenes show him in the factory yard throwing around pallets - and he checks their punch cards as they leave work in the evening.

Most of his employees are also Muslim, so Mao decides to dedicate a room of his factory to prayer - effectively founding a mosque. One of the employees, Hajj, has had some religious training and Mao designates him the mosque's imam.

One of the few non-Muslim characters in the crew is a fellow named Titi. He wants to convert and consults with Hajj about the best way to go about it. Greatly amused by Titi, the other men on the crew tease him mercilessly about whether he's been circumcised or not, saying that's the only way he can prove his dedication.

Not the brightest bulb in the pack, Titi goes home that evening, takes an old pair of scissors, pulls up his sparkling white thobe and tries to cut off his foreskin himself. There is no blood in this sequence, but the scene is still a show-stopper.

When the mosque is dedicated, some of the men in the congregation complain that they weren't consulted about who should act as the imam. "We all respect your learning," Titi tells Hajj, "but the fact is the boss chose you for the job." Most of the men agree with Hajj that Mao is being a good Muslim in opening the mosque, but two or three object and say Titi should be imam.

Audience sympathies would flow naturally to the boss, until Mao tells Hajj that he wants all his staff to convert to Islam, and that the workers should know that he'll cut their yearly bonuses if they don't attend mosque daily.

His relationship with his men deteriorates further when he announces that he'll have to sack all his mechanics because he can't afford the garage anymore. The men wonder at the fact that he can afford to open a mosque but not to pay them, and how he encourages them to pray while refusing to let them form a union.

The film's plot is, of course, a microcosm of the history of state-sponsored Islam and how it has contributed to the rise of the sort of militant (yet narrow-minded and unschooled) version of Islam popular among jihadis.

"Adhen" avoids being pat and trite by the quiet nuance of the central performances, not least that of Zaimeche himself, whose Mao manages to be both sympathetic and manipulative. Central too is the artfulness with which cinematographer Irina Lubtchansky makes use of the claustrophobic environment of the factory yard, with its tenement-like piles of pallets.

The masterstroke of the work, though, is Zaimeche's triple role as "boss" - writer and director as well as factory owner. The effect is to remind audience members that their relationship with him is not unlike that of Mao's workers with their boss.