Cinematical

The Yacoubian Building isn't this year's The Best of Youth, but with one or two positive reviews from American critics wowed by the Egyptian film's scope and polish, it could very easily be marketed as such. This near-three-hour soap opera has a lot going for it: It's apparently the most expensive Arabic-language film ever made; it's based on a best-selling novel of the same name which is considered the most widely read work of popular fiction in the contemporary Arab world; it stars Egypt's counterparts to Julia Roberts and Tom Cruise. More importantly, it does the noble service of serving up a plentiful slice of contemporary Egyptian culture, replete with Big Issues such as homosexuality, colonialism, class conflict, secular Islam, terrorism, and female exploitation. But it's still a soap opera -- which means that even the meatiest issues tackled within are brushed over with a swoony romantic sheen, which threatens to downgrade the endeavor from ethnographic document to lifestyle porn with a heavily moralistic edge.


As we learn through a brief prologue, the building in question (an actual structure in downtown Cairo) was once, at the dizzy height of Colonialism, the center of some kind of metropolitan paradise. Built by a wealthy Armenian in the 20s, the building housed Cairo's bourgeois elite: Upwardly mobile intellectuals, beautiful heiresses, monied foreigners, and, yes, as the narrator helpfully points out, "even jews". But through the years, as the facade of the structure decayed, so did the social rankings of its inhabitants, and by the film's present day, the Yacoubian Building has become a melting pot for the untitled classes, with aging Pashas and rising merchants sprinkled throughout the interior, and servants and peasants housed six to room in shacks on the roof. It's up on the roof that we find Bosaina, a gorgeous shopgirl who must suffer the indignities of sexual harassment to feed her elderly mom and siblings, as well as Taha, the pious son of the building's janitor, with whom she's in love. Down below, most of the action revolves around Zaki, an aging, alcoholic playboy; Hatim, a journalist of French lineage who woos a naive young soldier away from his wife and child; and Azaam, a Horatio Alger sort who learns that though money certainly can buy power, it may not be enough to keep it.

Admittedly, my familiarity with Egyptian film is just about nil, but Yacoubian seems as though it's been heavily tailored, at least aesthetically, for Western tastes -- which is another way of saying that's it's shot like a Selznick epic, and that with its Altman-lite interwoven narrative, even the most convoluted of its plot convulsions go down easy. There is the occasional snatch of dialogue that doesn't quite translate ("You've brought more men here to sleep than there are members of the El-Wafd party!"), but the filmmakers have undoubtedly attempted to bridge the culture gap between a secular Muslim public and a selective western (ie: American and European arthouse) audience. But ironically, it's that apparent mimicry of the Western soap operatic tone that caused the most confusion for this festivalgoer -- just because it looks like bad American television, doesn't mean it shares bad American television's [a]morality.

In fact, the film's ethical baseline seems to be in constant motion: narratives pop up seemingly for the purpose of tugging at liberal Western sympathies on issues such as gay rights and female empowerment, only to resolve themselves in either punishment or correction for characters with whose desires we've been asked to sympathise. An interesting effect of this narrative schizophrenia, though, is that no one on screen ends the film as the same person who began it; but in many cases, the characters seem to grow too much. Bosaina begins the film as a beautifully fiery moralist, so enraged that the shop owners she clerks for would expect sexual favors that she's forever quitting jobs; by the end, she's become the beautifully docile wife of a man three times her age, willingly sacrificing both her one true love and any morsel of individuality or independence, for a taste of the good life. We're asked to accept this transition as the right one (in fact, the married couple in question are the only ones allowed anything resembling a happy ending), so it's hard not to feel a bit cheated when the film is so clearly having its socio-progressive cake before not only eating it too, but ultimately smacking its frosting-flecked lips in sanctimonious delight.