Cairo calling

Youssef Chahine: forget the stereotypes

by Chris Fujiwara

To use film to broach injustice, racism, class division, and government policy is to court worldwide indifference. By long tradition, Hollywood movies about "social issues" are painfully self-conscious efforts afflicted by excessive sincerity and by that maudlin, choked-up, self-congratulatory, and at the same time above-it-all attitude that Hollywood types assume when they pool their skills with the intent to "give something back." Just as allergenic for most viewers is the typical mental image of a Third World film: a sleep-inducing mini-melodrama set in some backwater where everyone's name ends in a vowel and treating some dust-drenched theme like how bad poverty is for children's moral development.

Egyptian director Youssef Chahine single-handedly disproves the stereotypes of political film. He triumphs over all the disadvantages, and uses none of the alibis, of Third World cinema while showing that a director can make personal films on controversial subjects and still reach large audiences. Chahine's work is well known throughout the Arab world and has long been admired in France. His great Destiny had a limited American run last year. The Museum of Fine Arts is going some way toward remedying America's otherwise near-total ignorance of this superb director by showing five of his earlier features (a subset of the larger sample of his work that played at Lincoln Center last year) in a series that begins tonight (Thursday).

Chahine is a virtually unique figure in contemporary cinema: a filmmaker who unites the roles of intellectual, stylist, and popular entertainer and who refuses to be embarrassed under any of these three titles for what he chooses to do under the other two. Among his most appealing qualities are his freedom of tone and his refusal to obey the rules of genre; both are attested to by the startling presence of musical production numbers in a film about the medieval Arab philosopher Averroes (Destiny). Whatever their period and setting, all his films are political statements and are understood as such by their audiences, but unlike many Hollywood moviemakers who discover they have something to say, Chahine doesn't allow some predetermined message to dictate his images and limit his stylistic and moral options.

The earliest of the films in the MFA series, Cairo Station (1958; December 2 at 8 p.m.), uses its train-station setting to bring together an interesting cross-section of Egyptian society while recounting the doomed passion of Kenaoui, a newspaper vendor (marvelously played by Chahine himself as a deranged Chaplin), for a lemonade seller, Hanouma. Chahine flirts with neo-realist clichés only to dismantle them: he weaves glaring economic disparity, competition among porters, a union organizer who beats his girlfriend, and other politically charged motifs into the narrative rather than dwelling on them for their pathos or in order to point the audience toward some inescapable conclusion. His focus is on the frustration of the isolated Kenaoui, who's maddened by media-strewn images of an inaccessible sexual glamor. Chahine's mise-en-scène of Kenaoui's obsession is clearly influenced by the work of Fritz Lang, not just M but also the corrosive melodramas Scarlet Street, Human Desire (which also has a railroad background), and While the City Sleeps.

The Land (1969; December 11 at 3:30 p.m.) is set in a small village in 1933. The government has cut the town's irrigation quota in half; hard on the heels of this disaster comes the announcement that a new road will be built, which means that farmers' lands will be expropriated. With mounting tension, the film follows the conflicting reactions of the townspeople to these crises. If Cairo Station is reminiscent of Lang, the interweaving of characters, points of view, and plot strands in The Land recalls the large-canvas works of another great classicist, Otto Preminger (Exodus, Advise and Consent). Infused with a bracing sense of warm nights and the coolness of water, The Land has an almost subliminal visual beauty that never gets in the way of its narrative drive; Chahine's mixture of the understated and the confrontational could be a lesson to any director who wants to use entertainment to enlighten.

The other films in the MFA series are The Sparrow (1973; December 9 at 6 p.m.), a "network of fictions" surrounding the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967; and the first and third parts of Chahine's autobiographical trilogy, Alexandria, Why? (1978; December 3 at 7:50 p.m.) and Alexandria Again and Again (1989; December 16 at 8 p.m.). I can only assume that the two Alexandria films are comparable in brilliance to the mysteriously missing second part of the trilogy, Memory (1982) -- a briskly incisive film that's personally revealing in ways that most self-reflexive films wouldn't even contemplate.