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Throughout, Youssef Chahine remembers Fellini's key to self-analysis: "Comedy suits you better." His middle-aged stand-in (Nour El-Sherif) crumbles atop a camera crane from chest pains, stress and cigarettes and artistic crises add to the clogged arteries. He spends his hours before surgery quoting Shakespeare at the pub ("...and now doth time waste me"), anesthesia catapults him from the operation table into a this-is-your-life reverie. Chahine keeps the phantasmagoria light—the hallucinatory tribunal staged inside the director's open chest is a pulsating plastic tent, with architectural ribcages like the whale's cavernous insides in Pinocchio and oversized props out of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. The procession of garrulous witnesses includes mother (Soheir El-Bably) and sister (Magda El-Khatib) and wife (Yousra), "each claiming a part of the spoils" while the preteen self (Oussama Nadir) chuckles in the jury box. Memories undulate on the screen, the ardent juvenile from Alexandria... Why? (Mohsen Mohieddin) returns to get seduced by an older woman moments after getting his mug bloodied in a protest march against British occupiers. The nervous first trip to Cannes with Son of the Nile, the arduous shooting of Cairo Station, all for art, "the thermometer of civilization." A Gershwin flight in New York, an encouraging word from Henri Langlois in Moscow, real bullets with insurgents in Algiers. The circus is kept together by Chahine's willingness to turn the lens toward his contradictory passions and neuroses, his fierce Egyptian roots as well as his "dreams of the West." All cinéastes envision their lives through the projector, though few slice through the vanity and cry, "I am an extra with no dialogue!" With Ahmed Mehrez, Leila Hamada, Mohamed Mounir, and Ragaa Hussein.
--- Fernando F. Croce |