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TRIBECA REVIEW: THE YACOUBIAN BUILDING
by Karina Longworth
Cinematical, CA
May 3 2006
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.
http://www.cinematical.com/2006/05/03/tr ibeca-review-the-yacoubian-building/
by Karina Longworth
Cinematical, CA
May 3 2006
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.
http://www.cinematical.com/2006/05/03/tr ibeca-review-the-yacoubian-building/