Film in the shadow of the pyramids.

The Egyptian film is the dominant African cinema and appears to have been since at least the 1920s. It has been distributed to Arabic speakers worldwide through that period.

Chahine

IMDB runs a list of the hundred most important Egyptian films (earliest 1930) and after a lifetime’s effort I recognise about a dozen, mainly the films of Youseff Chahine who has acquired Token Arab Filmmaker status. The Paris Cinémathèque did an Egyptian season ten years back. Among fifty, they found one 1930s film. I knew four in their lineup. I suspect those totals put me well ahead of most professionals. Paris now has a Center of Arab Culture doing regular screenings.

SBS did manage a run of Chahine’s best films and festivals pick up a few widely spaced hits - The Yacobian Building, The Nile Hilton Incident and Chahine’s handsome French co production El masar/ Le destin. Things looked up briefly in the DVD era with shops in Punchbowl and Brighton le Sands offering a range of  then recent product (I found al Raghba, / Desire, a 1980 version of  “The Great Gatsby” with Nour El Sherif from Le Destin) and, rather better, a multiplex in Merrylands aired first releases in new, theatrical, English subtitled copies. Of course, those doors slammed shut.

Menna Shalabi & Mohamed Henedy.

However before that happened I ran into the films of Mohamed Henedi who has been described as the Robert De Niro of the Middle East - a bit far fetched. He seems closer to Jim Carey. Henedy turns up in Chahine’s accomplished 1990 Iskanderija, kaman oue kaman/ Alexandria Again and Forever but his impact is as a silly ass comic in a string of increasingly ambitious vehicles, which are generally the most common items where Arab cinema is offered. His YouTube entry runs to pages and, point of the story, a small selection of his work is now on Netflix with good English sub-titles.

Muhammad Yasin’s 2003 Askar fi el-mu'askar/Asker Fel-Moasker/ Askar at the Camp/ Sodiers of the Camp, the earliest of the translated  Henedi films, runs to some ambitious staging. It is done mainly in brief comic sketches, linked by scattered plot elements - military training, (cf. Bob Hope in Caught in the Draft among others) a blood feud (think Ugo Tognazzi in Questione d’onore), the friendship with chubby army buddy Maged El Kedwany (like Aamir Kahn in Laal Singh Chaddha),  Moh’s wedding to the appealing Lekaa El Khomaisy or the disillusion of finding his history teacher uncle Salah Abdulla become Hassan Kolonia the Perfumer, a night club entertainer.

Soldiers of the Camp.

We move from service comedy to Moh’s home leave in Luxor. After he tells El Khamisy / Saadeya, his lady friend, about Egypt as “the center of the world”, they plan their wedding, despite her agro relatives setting the cornfield where they are meeting on fire. In-laws are a problem in these films. The shadow of his family feud hangs over their plans.

The wedding is the film’s high point with chanting women, a blazing torch parade, Moh on horseback with an AK 16, armed guards protecting the ceremony and checking guests while the couple huddle in a sandbag shelter. Complications involve Moh’s dad giving the bridal couple’s bedding to the bodyguards, along with the TV.

Our hero’s army buddy Maged El Kedwany naturally turns out to be the son of the enemy family. Despite all the security, El Kedwany is admitted as a friend of the groom just by flashing an I.D. and comes under fire in his own relatives’ raid, before he can do any avenging.

Moh and the bride flee by train to Cairo, seeking once respectable uncle Salah Abdulla. However he now shares a Cabaret stage with an energetic redhead shimmy dancer, who is ambivalent about having the pair move into her flat. She drags the bride into the bedroom and leaves the couch to the men.

Uncle gets the newlyweds a job as costumed players in a pharaonic show for tourists but the murderous feud catches up with them. Fleeing to a waste ground shanty, the lovers’ attempts to get it on are again thwarted. Sharing a truck load of sand has them once more frustrated, dumped on a building site.

For a bit of cultural dissonance, how about Saadeya, the new wife, who Moh had to threaten with a knife to get her to come across, now complaining that she’s been a bride for three days and she’s still a virgin?

Moh’s attempt to get a transfer away from the camp, where Metawali is also a soldier, is rejected. Sharing the same bunkhouse proves fraught and Moh finds himself on prisoner detail, hand cuffed to a soldier returning to his home to be engulfed by his old neighbors before a suitably happy ending.

The leads are winning and their material serves them well. Wide screen colour production values are good and the unfamiliar setting catches attention, rural local colour - Buffalo in the river, Moh saluting a historic sculpture he passes - contrasted with metropolitan landmarks - the Pointing Statue, the 6th of October Bridge or the the fakey Cairo tourist show the pair are recruited into. This goes with material like the scenes of military training - black uniforms in choreographed hand to hand  combat curiously like Beau Travaille. Just when we are accepting the similarities with our own world we get Moh protesting when his new wife goes marketing with her hair hanging loose or the Sergeant’s first wife finding about the second.

Also on show is Henedy’s most widely offered film, the 2004 Fool el seen el azeem /The Great Chinese Beans directed by Sherif Arafa.

Here the young Moh, who just wants to use his 51% college pass to get an education, is have trouble sleeping, when a burglar breaks in and demands the whereabouts of his gang Czar grand father. At this point, his murderous uncles appear, telling him he’s failed the courage test. They are barely restrained from offing the kid, instead getting him up in a padded muscles suit to conduct their drug buy, where he escapes leaving them behind. So it’s a matter of packing him off to his singer mum who he blinded (!) when he dropped the chandelier on her, during one of her performances in a B&W flashback.

His father in law has Moh substitute for him in an Iron Chef competition in China (actually Thailand) sending him off with a note in Chinese that says he is carrying drugs, stolen by his hapless fellow passenger while our hero is sucked into the jetliner loo for five hours.

Moh is collected by the fetching girl translator in a cab, whose driver keeps on throwing away cell ‘phones with unwelcome messages. Our hero finds a fellow Arab from Beirut in the finals but a Chinese gang, knowing his mob background, figures Mohamed must be there as a hitman and hires him to off the judge, which he avoids by slipping the passenger’s laxative into the meals - ho ho.

The Great Chines Beans

The payoff, delivered by the granny, who holds up threatening messages during the competition, proves to be blank paper and a bomb. His translator hides our hero with her family in the country, saying he’s a suitor, and they set tests for him like eating grasshoppers (close up), Sumo wrestling and leaping off high places. The acupuncturist Grandfather encourages him to use inner strength, which comes in handy when the gangsters show up. The girl will only give her stick-fighter dad his pole if he agrees to help our hero.

At the cooking contest in disguise, Moh emerges from behind the pillar in his chef outfit and wins, scarpering from the assassins but helping a family to victory by using his falling out of tree skill. These films are not strong on logical development.

There’s some obvious wire work, which they demonstrate under the end credits and a few alien moments like the lead encouraging “pray to the prophet!” and joining the Lebanese chef in Arabism.

The locating stock shots are fuzzy digital transfers, like the Egypt Air in-flight material but technical standards are quite good and the pacing carries things, with the leads appealing.

The showpiece here is the new El Ens W El Nems / Humans vs. the Mongoose, again directed Sharif Arafah and clearly a prestige product from its home industry. This big screen, contemporary piece kicks off with Henedi’s family trying to reassure the Parks Inspector that their Kids Fun Fair haunted house exhibit is not scary, despite jump shock figures dropping out of the ceiling as they tour.

We shift to domestic comedy with the family sharing the crowded home bathroom over Mohamed’s objections. Out on the street, he stops a bus hitting not quite pretty Menna Shalabi - who proves a remarkable screen presence. Turns out she’s a Djinn (think Three Thousand Years of Longing) who now can’t get enough of him, being under pressure having aged past the point where she qualifies for an arranged marriage. She invites Mohamed to visit her family home, reached through a fog bank past submerged sculptures, under the guidance of identical, towering, formal dress butlers.

Humans and the Mongoose.

At the spooky mansion, he is greeted by a carnival of monsters, with her parents Sabeen and Amr Abdulgalil, unimpressed among the devil and goblin characters. “We are another race superior to the savages.” After their spooky dance Moh’s awarded a gold bar by Abdulgalil, given to remarks like “I’ll separate his flesh from his bones” and ripping the head off fellow demons. Told not to leave his bedroom at night, Mohamed of course wanders the corridors confronting Shalabi’s chubby sword-wielding, young brother, a zombie and the mongoose, leaving its framed portrait, to swell into a monster which chases him before he finds a lava pit at the foot of a bat filled circular spiral staircase pit. Dad erases his memory, leaving him think it was a dream.

He recruits Mohamed for his confrontation with tailed genie Bayoumi Fouad, who ends up back in the scummiest bottle on earth with the prospect of being buried under a toilet for the next thousand years.

Shalabi is anxious to get on with the fecundation (a light shines under the bedroom door) but Moh, who’s been told her dad will eat him afterward, is somehow reluctant. However she assures him she won’t let that happen to the father of her offspring and her brother adds to his defense, with the now liberated genie joining his team. “If death is inevitable, it is a shame to die a coward.”

Moh’s long-lost father also shows up to guide him to the magician who produces the leather incantation and the bottled spell to be dropped into one of the lava pits (which one?) to stave off the Djinns.

Some nice urban drone shots as punctuation, lots of CG, which is good enough (battle with the Mongoose) in an area where spectacular is common. This one constantly evokes Hollywood models, Jim Carey, Ghostbusters, Men in Black, along with an abrupt Bollywood number, and is paced by inscrutable references like Hano Bavela. The mix is one of the things that hold attention along with backing the winning leads with talented (unfamiliar to us) comics and superior production values.

From the indications in this small sample, Henedi’s films become more ambitious and more approachable as they go. Their scatology without nudity is not for all tastes but kids will devour these.

Ismail Yasine

We got some way down this road before - English sub-titled copies of the fifties comedies of  Ismail Yasine -  his “Cat & the Canary” knock off, Tarzan impersonation or Haram alek spun off Abbott & Costello meet the Ghosts.  They were quite modest black & white affairs and not exactly side splitting but, for some unaccountable reason, they persisted as bootleg DVDs  and they got to be pretty well all the black & white era Egyptian films circulating in the English language market.

Henedi is a more gifted career comedian. I’d place him middle of a scale above Toto, Cantinflas and Jerry Lewis, on a par with Red Skelton before he expanded into TV and maybe shaded by Bob Hope, Lino Banfi, Fernandel and Adam Sandler.

Significantly these comedians are handled dismissively by critics and never make it into festivals. When the horror films were treated this way, their admirers started their own festivals and the work was accepted into the fold. This has never happened with the comics.

However there’s another buzz to be had out of watching Mohamed Henedi’s films. It’s like being faced with Mehboob Kahn and Nargis in the fifties or Sammo Hung and the Shaw Brothers in the seventies. Those films were a bridge into a whole world of film going which we vaguely knew existed but had never been invited to enter. There’s the lure that maybe we can repeat that experience. It could be misleading but Henedi projects an enormously sympathetic personality. His comic timing is impressive and he occupies a space at once familiar and surprising to us. It can’t be a bad idea to discover the way the Arab world thinks of popular entertainment. I enjoy that.

Barrie Pattison 2023