• Alexandria…Why? (Iskanderija… lih?)

8/26/24 (Sun)

Youssef Chahine attempts to make an Egyptian version of Amarcord to mixed results in this autobiographical 1979 film. Set in Alexandria during the war, the film portrays the determination of the teenaged Yahia, a stand-in for Chahine, to become a film actor and director. The family, though in reduced circumstances, manages to send him to a good school, the father hoping that the boy will become an engineer. While his friends want to drink and pick up women, Yahia prefers watching movies or acting out Hamlet (very dramatically). Society is in flux as it is nowhere clear whether the British or Germans will prevail and what that will mean for Egypt. But Yahia thinks only of cinema. His aims become an obsession, and despite a lack of money or connections, he dreams of going to Pasadena to attend film school.

The sprawling narrative encompasses other stories as well, most notably a group planning to capture Churchill and hand him to the Nazis, exchanging one set of occupiers (British) for another (Germans); an aristocrat who aims to kill a foreign soldier but falls in love with him instead in a surprising gay subplot; and a Jewish woman who, though married to a Muslim communist, leaves behind generations of Egyptian life with her family and escapes to Palestine in the face of the German advance. (I rolled my eyes at the father’s subsequent bitter report concerning Jews fighting in pre-Israel Palestine  – why did Chahine think they were fighting? Egypt and Israel were at peace by the time the film was made, but maybe he felt impelled to throw this in. In any event, the sideline was a distraction from the film’s focus on Alexandria.)

Whatever the general distaste for the British among the Egyptian public, Yahia and his group are steeped in Western culture and ambition. We see him enthralled to “Stairway to Paradise” from An American in Paris, a film that in fact wasn’t released until around a decade after the events in the film (though one perceptive reviewer notes that the singer/dancer was an expat Alexandrian, thus justifying the anachronism to some extent; the song itself is after all quite old). The period music is mainly Western tunes like “Perfidia”, Ella’s “Lady Be Good” and Glenn Miller’s “In the Mood”. We also get a bit of Vera Lynn in “White Cliffs of Dover”, related to the British soldier from that town who became the aristocrat’s love object. Egyptian patriotism was lightly worn.

The director has trouble juggling the various strands of the complicated plot. He has some clumsy sequences, especially the exaggerated chaos of Chahine’s disastrous stage show. The numerous stories are not always clearly linked, and the editing can be abrupt. The film is quite open about sexual encounters, like the attempt by the boys to bonk the prostitute in the back seat of a car as their friend continues to drive. There’s a moving coda to the aristocrat’s story in the massive El Alamein War Cemetery as he cries openly at the grave of the handsome and innocent English soldier he had befriended, bitter at the vagaries of fate.

The story picks up momentum toward the close as the family works frantically to get the money and visa for Yahia to go to the US within a tight deadline, achieving the lightness of tone that the filmmaker was trying for all along. As Yahia finally reaches the US at the end, there is the odd sight of a group of Orthodox Jews praying, then the Statue of Liberty morphs into what looks like a drag version of the boy, winking at him as she welcomes him to the country. One review suggested that she’s supposed to be a heavily made-up prostitute, apparently commenting on the filmmaker’s feelings for the US. In any case, it ends the film on a fun note.

The film benefits from top-notch performances by Mohsen Mohieddine as Yahia, Naglaa Fathi as the Jewish girl, and Ahmed Mehrez as the aristocrat, along with some great character roles scattered throughout. While Chahine unquestionably overreaches, he does it with flair.