Cairo & Beijing.

Hot on the tail of Ali Abbasi’s Iranian Ankabut-e moqaddas / Holy Spider comes another counterfeit, Tarik Saleh’s filmed-in-Turkey Walad min al-Janna/ The Cairo Conspiracy originally The Boy From Heaven, another film made abroad, about his original country by a disaffected national, to add to Mozjoukine in Hollywood's Surrender, Edward Dmytrick’s British Give Us This Day, the Taiwanese The Coldest Winter in Peking or the  French Swallows of Kabul.

Saleh had been around for a long time before his 2017 The Nile Hilton Incident drew attention. His impressive 2009 animated Metropia had some screening.

Cairo Conspiracy centers on young rural  fisherman-family Tawfeek Barhom, with his pox marked face, accepted for the University at Cairo’s prestigious Azhar Mosque, the center of Sunni Islam rituals descended from the fifteen hundreds.  His Cairo taxi driver tells him he will become a sheik.

In Parallel with this, the State Security Organisation meets to be told by General Mohammad Bakri that the President requires his own man be elected the Mosque’s new Iman to resolve long running church and state disputes. Nasser, Saddat and Mubarek have already failed to bring the institution under their control. Bearded, scruffy Colonel Fares Fares has been given the task. 

Actor Fares also has form. Based in Sweden like Saleh, he appeared with Denzel Washinton in Safe House and became prominent in the series Deparment Q and its remarkable spin-off feature  Flaskepost fra P/Matter of Faith, directed by Hans Petter Moland no less. Fares had done one of the voices in Metropia.   

However the Colonel’s agent among the Azhar students has been exposed and, called on to find a replacement, he sets up Barhom. A night of cell phone conversation with Fares, between adjacent tables at the American Coffee house, offers the incentive of the gallstones operation which will save his father Samy Soliman’s life. Barhom returns to the Mosque to see his contact struck down by black robe men with knives. No one mentions the Muslim Brotherhood.

Fares’ investigation runs parallel with the students circle classes sitting in the Mosque court yard, learning the difference between Sharia and its enforcement, seeing biology demonstrated by a white mouse exposed to a coiled snake or listening to revered blind sheik Makram J. Khoury, who quotes from Karl Marx - impressive shots of the lines of red cap students passing along the background colonnades. 

 

 Fares forbids Barhom’s calls for advice to his village Iman and instructs him to join the Mosque's dawn prayer group. The boy identifies its members for him, from the wall display of passport photos. They accept him, while their leader is surpassed by Barhom’s dormitory associate in a Koran recitation contest broadcast on the mosque P.A. to the massed students. Fares requires the winner discredited and has Barhom plant police files under his mattress - impressive downwards shot of his one red cap moving through the standing crowd.

Still, the defeated student leader becomes suspicious and Barhom has to text S.O.S. to Fares, while he is being taken to the parapet of the Mosque tower. He is being threatened there when the Colonel shows up. “The drop is twelve meters - maybe thirteen” he tells the student leader, advising he should end his religious education and choose another profession “Tourism is opening up... The Sphinx is smiling again.” The parapet scene is the film’s highlight, as Fares psychs out the student without violence.

From this point The Cairo Conspiracy loses the considerable impetus it has built up. The blind sheik confesses to the agent’s murder, trusting the courts rather than the papers he knows to be in the government’s power.

Young Barhom becomes Fares’ agent in discrediting a rival Iman with an incriminating question at the massed rally. However the masterful Colonel himself is shown to be unequal to his younger, stronger commander and Barhom, who has demonstrated his scholarship by dismissing Fares’ burning boats analogy, and without knowing the personal danger he runs, resolves the situation in a jail cell debate with the blind Iman. I wonder if anyone thought of the comparison with Alec Guiness and Jack Hawkins in The Prisoner.

The film gets attention by mixing Sixteenth Century ritual and present day politics, mass religious spectacle and an Iman hoovering his mosque carpet or Halal Big Macs. The only women characters are marginal domestic figures. Use of its simulated location impresses and performances are superior. Even if the ending lets down the imposing development, this is a notable departure from what we are used to seeing.

One commentator quoted the Arab proverb "Man will be free only when the last king has been strangled with the last priest’s entrails."

On the Net, you can find a copy of Xu’s Ang's 2014 Shi'er gongmin / 12 Citizens, a Mainland Chinese transcription of Reginald Rose’s Twelve Angry Men. It was only when this was drawn to my attention that I realised how widely the work has been filmed since Franklin Shaffner’s 1954 TV production, including the 1957 Sidney Lumet-Henry Fonda movie, Artur Ramosthe’s 1962 Argentinian  12 Homens en Competo, the Polish 1963 Kaksitoista Vacamiesta, a 1963 German Die zwölf Geschworenen, Artur Ramons’ 1973 Doze Homens em Conflito, Basu Chatterjee’s 1986  Hindi Ek ruka hua faisla / A Pending Decision , Nakahara Shun’s 1991 Japanese The Gentle Twelve 12, a 1991 William Friedkin-Jack Lemmon film, Dom Thuil’s 2010 French 12 Hommes en colère and probably a whole lot more. It’s surprising how extensively a piece of precisely located special pleading has taken off. The most impressive effort to me remains Nikita Mikalkhov’s 2007 12, the longest and most resonant production.

The Chinese film is set up by a framing story about law students exploring the American legal system, which doesn't exist in their country, by hearing an actual case with a dummy trial in front of a jury of family and law school staff. It’s distracting to watch what elements of the original they preserve and what ones they jettison.

 He Bing.

Here we actually get a glimpse of the killer leaving the murder scene as a train passes. There’s an attempt to detail a new environment by staging the deliberations in a store room where they keep the fire extinguishers. Instead of a heat wave we get a storm, which leaks through the roof about the time discussions are getting angry, and up dates like dissenting juror He Bing comparing the illegal knife he bought off the net with the murder weapon viewed on his lap top. Possibly the most telling alteration is that the wavering juror is no longer reproached for his instability as victim of his Madison Avenue thinking. 

The Chinese are more considerate that their U.S. originals. Otherwise it’s pretty much the familiar development - deliberations reveal the jurors’ prejudices with the requirement of a unanimous verdict driving the action. They do throw in references to the Hundred Flowers period and the Gang of Four. Gao Dongping’s gangster tattoo can be glimpsed through his sweat soaked shirt and instead of an accused from a U.S. minority we get a well-off adoptee turning on his birth father, a bit of class warfare. Again there are no women characters.

Lead He Bing was in Zhang Yang‘s Xi zao / Shower back in 1999. Technical work is efficient rather than accomplished. The restricted palette of the Chinese lab work fits the drabness the film utilises. The performances are all nicely judged and first time movie director Ang Xu is smart in choosing a subject which relies on the skill with actors he has been able to develop in a successful theater career. 

The copy is sharp, correctly framed and has good sub-titles.

Barrie Pattison 2023.