WATANI International
31 May 2009
Every film director is entitled to his own ideology and political perspective, and is definitely free to represent them in film. But a film is a film. It is one thing to present political views in a proper film that enjoys all the elements of skilful film-making and quite another to have a film converted into a loud political manifesto. Yet this appears to be just what the talented director Khaled Youssef did with his most recent film Dukkan Shehata (Shehata’s Shop) .
Biblical story line
The story, written by screenplay writer Nasser Abdel-Rahman, centres on Haggag, a man who comes from Upper Egypt and is thus by definition conservative. Haggag’s second wife, whom he dearly loves, gives him a baby boy, Shehata, and dies during childbirth. Haggag, masterfully played by Mahmoud Hemeida, loves Shehata more than all his other children whom he had by his little-loved first wife. The story line is strongly reminiscent of the Biblical story of Joseph the youngest and most favoured of Jacob’s sons.
And as in the story of Joseph, Shehata’s brothers hate him despite his goodness and kind heart which endear him to all.
Haggag and his sons work as gardeners for a man who owns a villa surrounded by large grounds and who, because of his love and appreciation of Haggag, decides to grant him a little plot of land on which he can build a shop to sell the surplus fruit of the orchard. Haggag in turn grants the shop to his beloved son, and hence “Shehata’s shop”.
Shehata, played by the promising young actor Amr Saad, falls in love with Bissa, played by the Lebanese voluptuous pop singer Haifa Wahby, who was cast by Youssef as leading lady for obvious commercial reasons. Wahby’s performance was rather weak, especially as compared to the superiority of the cast. Wahby, however, cannot be blamed too much since this is her first acting experience.
Haggag’s second son greedily loves Bissa, but the father succeeds to get the girl engaged to his beloved son Shehata. After the death of their father, Shehata’s brothers take their revenge upon him by claiming that the shop is not legally his but is the joint property of them all. Shehata is imprisoned; meanwhile his brother marries Bissa by force, with the help of her idiotic brother, “stupid Karam”, played by Amr Abdel-Galil. It is Karam’s idiocy that acts as the comic element in the otherwise rather depressive events of the film.
The villa owner suddenly quits the scene of events; it is claimed he was sick and left the country for medication abroad. His son decides to sell the property to a buyer who is later revealed to be the Israeli Embassy in Cairo. He succeeds in obtaining permission from the Haggag brothers to sell the shop as well.
When Shehata is released from prison and goes searching for his brothers with love and forgiveness, they kill him.
Ultra-depressive
The director exploited the events to crowd his political perspective into the film. But the political and historical instances are not included seamlessly into the plot; Shehata is merely used as a silent witness to many of the catastrophes that befell Egypt during the recent years. Among these incidents are the assassination of President Anwar al-Sadat, the fire at Beni-Sweif theatre which claimed some 40 lives, the violent bread lines, shortage of drinking water, rigging elections, and others.
Some analysts saw Shehata’s shop, especially when it was sold to Israel, as a symbol of Egypt, while others believed it indicated the inherent trait of Egyptian kindness which, if murdered, would lead to ruination and chaos.
The director ends the film with a rapidly running series of scenes which are, to say the least, scary. He depicts the entire chaos, violence, and oppression that could be expected if Islamic groups are ever to rule Egypt. A typical example is a scene where a married couple walking in the street are stopped by a group of bearded men carrying knives and guns and the woman is forced to wear a hijab on the spot. One woman is depicted as she—shaking with fear—hurriedly slams shut her door with six separate locks, while a man is shown soldering shut a small window to his home as his terrified wife and children look on.
The spectators were appalled; several in the hall vociferously condemned the film as ultra-depressive.
Queries
The film aroused a number of queries. Why should the leftist, the villa owner, be arrested on the day President Sadat was assassinated, while in reality Sadat’s assassins were directly arrested after they shot him? Also in reality, the assassins all belonged to the Islamist stream. Why should the film mourn President Gamal Abdel-Nasser, describing him as the father of Egypt and the source of all good while, his wrong policies are seen by many Egyptians to be behind most of the ills Egypt is now suffering from? And howcome the film appears to call for democracy while at the same time yearning for the good old days of the dictator [Nasser]?
Does hosting the Israeli embassy in Cairo mean selling the nation to ‘the enemy’? Or is it merely to stir up hatred against Israel?
A few of the film’s scenes are dramatically unjustified. It is unheard of that a conservative Upper Egyptian man—Bissa’s brother—asks his sister to give a solo seductive dance performance for her fiancé, as he sits by. Or is it just about abusing Wahby’s allure?
Finally, no one can deny the superb film-making technique used by Youssef. Sadly, it is lost upon the viewers, most of whom leave the film with an acute sense of depression. And even though the music and songs could have been used to add a valuable dramatic dimension, they ended up more like heart-breaking lamentations.