Singin' on the Nile

Egyptian musicals at the MFA

by Chris Fujiwara

"MUSIC ON THE NILE: FIFTY YEARS OF EGYPTIAN MUSICALS;" At the Museum of Fine Arts February 12 through 27.

Egypt has the oldest filmmaking tradition of any country in the Arab world, and the musical is one of Egypt's great film genres. "Music on the Nile: Fifty Years of Egyptian Musical Films," a traveling series produced by the American Research Center in Egypt and hosted in Boston by the Museum of Fine Arts, offers a tantalizing introduction to the wonders of the Egyptian musical. In five films, the MFA can't do more than sample the genre (the series was shorn at the last minute of a sixth film, The Sweetness of Love, which will be replaced by the documentary Umm Kulthum: A Voice like Egypt on February 27 at 2:15 p.m.). The pre-World War II period is unrepresented. Three films represent the peak late-'40s-to-'50s period; the one film that stands for the genre's limited '90s revival does so shakily and should have been replaced by a movie of older vintage.

The earliest film in the series, Anwar Wagdi's 1949 The Flirtation of Girls (Ghazal al-Banat; February 12 at 8 p.m.), stars Naguib al-Rihani as an elderly schoolteacher who falls in love with the rich girl (Leila Murad) he is hired to tutor. Notable for the expressive purity of its visual style and for al-Rihani's intense performance, the film is a pleasing mixture of music, wacky comedy, anxiety, and embarrassment. An unexpectedly bizarre and beautiful scene occurs near the end when the two principal characters visit a rich man. Their host opens a door to reveal a large, dark room in which singer Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab and a full orchestra perform for themselves. We and the characters eavesdrop on them until the song ends, and then the door shuts; there has been no interaction between the characters and the musicians, and no adequate explanation for this miraculous apparition.

Anwar Wagdi also directed and co-starred in Dahab (1953; February 13 at 1:30 p.m.), a showcase for child star Fayruz. Calling Fayruz "the Egyptian Shirley Temple" is selling her short: she's free of Temple's cloying respect for her elders, and at one point in Dahab she does a belly dance that viciously parodies adult sexuality from a child's point of view and can be seen as either disturbingly failed-cute or scandalously subversive.

Ahmad Diya' al-Din's Every Beat of My Heart (Kull Daqqa fi Qalbi, 1959; February 20 at 2:30 p.m.) tries to wring comedy out of the situation of a dance queen (the fabulous Samiya Gamal) who repeatedly drives while drunk and runs over people. Her 13th victim is a teacher (Muhammad Fawzi) who, while recuperating in her house, falls in love with her. The film, whose drab visuals sometimes approximate Jean-Luc Godard's famous vision of a "neo-realist musical," is notable for the cut-rate surrealism of its abstract production numbers, including a scene in which Fawzi watches enraptured from his sickbed as a framed picture of Gamal comes to undulating life.

With the nationalization of the Egyptian cinema in the early '60s, the star fetishism, lack of social purpose, and Hollywood connotations of the standard musical fell into disfavor. Along came such idealistic concoctions as Ali Rida's Love in Karnak (Gharam fi al-Karnak, 1967; February 19 at 6:30 p.m.), a comedy about the efforts of a folkloric dance troupe to put on a show at the Temple of Karnak. Agreeably Soviet-style in its mix of ideology with an innocuous romantic plot, Love in Karnak also recalls the musicals of Stanley Donen (Singin' in the Rain, Funny Face) in its pleasurable tension between the artificiality of the show-biz musical and the naturalism of its settings. Hard, bold colors evoke a world both real and magical; Luxor is overrun with Americans and Italians; through vast spaces lined with colonnades and sphinxes, dancers run geometrically amok, singing their sublimely inane refrain: "Follow me, boys -- /Toot-toot/We're in the temple of Hatshepsut!" Rida stages a dance with construction lumber in which the glamorization of routine is no less exhilarating than Donen's factory scenes in The Pajama Game.

In Kharyri Bishara's Ice Cream in Gleam (Ays Krim fi Glim, 1992; February 26 at 6 p.m.), an aspiring singer (Amr Diyab) lacks opportunities to pursue his goals until he teams up with a student and an alcoholic street musician to form an outfit that gets gigs by pretending to be handicapped. The film is strident, diffuse, crappy-looking, and finally terrible, but its device of having people burst into short fragments of song in naturalistic contexts seems appropriate for a contemporary musical and could easily be used in a Hollywood film (probably with fewer scenes of people crying).

Those seeking to discover the great directorial stylists of the Egyptian musical will find the MFA series inconclusive. The conditions present during the genre's heyday quite probably produced, if not a Donen or a Vincente Minnelli, at least a Charles Walters (Lili) or a George Sidney (Pal Joey, Viva Las Vegas). But Anwar Wagdi's two films here are primarily works of emotion, not style, and though Love in Karnak proves Ali Rida's exuberance, one would like more evidence of his range (he directed many films). The MFA series reminds us how badly we need a major retrospective of the Egyptian cinema.