My father has told me that Chahine wrote his scripts in French, then translated them to English, then finally to Arabic, so many times throughout my artistic coming of age that it’s the first thing I think of when Chahine is brought up. This is the first of his films that I’ve ever seen, but it’s so apparent that Chahine cuts no corners when he writes; you can tell the script written with immense passion and love, through fatigue-heavy eyelids and late nights because this is a story that just had to be told.
Chahine brings together aspects of Egyptian society that the world would much rather are never brought to light: a Jewish girl in love with a Muslim revolutionary, a working-class boy who refuses to accept the mundane life he’s been given, a young Arab jew indoctrinated by the hungry jaws of Zionism, a gay Egyptian mourning a British soldier he wishes he’d never met. Chahine not only gives these unorthodox characters a gilded stage, but he also breathes life into them by letting them tell their own stories, without imposing any of society’s biases against them.
I was constantly awed by the mastery of this film. The coloring made me immensely homesick for summers by the Mediterranean, and the inclusion of real footage from the war was at once jarring and grounding. The transition from Tommy on the battlefield to Yehia on stage deserves a special mention.
The cast of this movie breathed so much life into the script I can’t imagine what it would be without them. Yehia crying during the finale of his failed performance tore my heart into pieces; the way Qadry looked at Tommy made me feel like I too was in love; Ibrahim meeting his son through the bars of a jail cell made me so unreasonably happy; Yehia’s father’s conversation with Ibrahim shook me in a way I wasn’t aware I could be shaken. وعايزني اكسب؟
الله يرحمك يوسف شهين
Thank you for giving Yehia (and by extension, me) the optimistic ending we are so rarely afforded.
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