The three-hour-long screen adaptation of Alaa' Al-Aswany's mega-best-selling (in Arabic) novel, Omaret yakobean (Yacoubian Building), directed by Marwan Hamed, adapted by his father Waheed Hamed, is remarkably faithful to the book. Almost everything in the book is in the movie and almost everything in the movie is from the book. (I'll get to one major exception later).

As I said in reviewing the book, there are many characters, many romances, a lot of greed, a lot of lust, considerable official corruption, and ruthless suppression of dissent. The transformation of Tahir (Mohamed Imam) a secular student more interested in wooing his beautiful neighbor Busayna (Hend Sabri) than in politics or religion into an Islamist killer is the story line most likely to capture the attention of those who might dismiss the portrayal of various socioeconomic strata living in once grand apartments and in what were originally storage sheds on the roof as "soap opera." Tahir aspired to enroll in the police academy, but is rejected because his father is a janitor. In college, he is rejected by the rich kids and drifts into an Islamist group. He is swept up by the police and his honor is destroyed through brutal rapes (what is done to him is more explicit in the book, but the basis of his insatiable thirst for revenge is plenty clear enough in the movie).

Meanwhile, the girl-next-door, Busayna (Hend Sabri) has to put up with something more than sexual harassment. Her mother insists that she stay in a job in a store in which the owner takes her (and other attractive female employees) into the store room and rubs against them to the point of ejaculation. This is messy as well as humiliating, but the family needs the bonus money she receives.

Then there is a Coptic family from Alexandria who contract their sister into being the concubine of a corrupt businessman (buying a parliamentary seat), Haj Azzam (Nour El Sherif), an ostentatiously pious fraud whose wife is finished with sex. The contract requires leaving the woman's son in Alexandria and not getting pregnant — terms she finds impossible to sustain.

The businessman/politician is reminded that he owes everything to the party leader who wants a bigger cut of the profits.

Members of the old elite who remain in the art deco palace from the 1920s are more focused on amour than avarice. They are also humiliated by officials (the heterosexual couple) or by having to accommodate to the superstitions of the up-country, married policeman with whom the refined Francophile (and half-French) stereotypically homosexual publisher ensnares.

Plot spoiler alert

Busayna goes to work as a personal assistant to the 65-year-old habitual philanderer Zaki el Dessouki (Adel Imam). He has a vicious sister who takes out her frustrations at her three failed marriages and absent children (all expatriated) on him. Busayna and Zaki are seized in a police raid orchestrated by Zaki's sister Dawlat (Essad Youniss) and humiliated, but survive and become devoted to each other.

The major change is in the old-fashioned The Homosexual Must Die plot. That murder or suicide must befall homosexual characters was a(n unwritten) rule in American and English fiction and movies of the 1950s into the 1960s. Hatim (the publisher of a French-language Cairo newspaper, played by Khaled El Sawy) is portrayed as more of a predator in the movie than in the book. He picks up and ensnares Abduh (Bassem Samra), a young, dumb, and full of ___ policeman from upriver. Abduh has a wife back home and has been taught that sodomy makes the throne of heaven tremble. In the book, after Abduh's son dies, Abduh leaves and Hatim lures him back for a night and then infuriates Abduh by violating the agreement he made. In the movie, Abduh leaves and Hatim picks up some rough trade who strangles him while he is waiting to be penetrated. There is something suicidal in what Hatim does in both variants.

Both versions also illustrate what I have called "the will not to know." Zaki actually acknowledges that his neighbor seeks masculine young men instead of nubile young women as he does, but Hatim's employees and Abduh's wife struggle not to give any acknowledgment that they know that their boss and her husband have sex with each other.

While in plot-spoiler alert territory, I might as well also reveal that Tahir "goes crazy" (his rage leading to jettisoning the plan) to get revenge for his prison violations. (There is a close parallel to the jettisoning of plans by an Islamized student in "Rendition," though in that the vengeance is for the youth's brother.)

End of plot spoiler alert

Although long, the movie was absorbing and entertaining. I fear that its relevance will increase when Mubarak dies or is incapacitated. For relevance, it is the humiliations and reactions to it of the younger characters that matter. The book and movie expend considerable space/time on the residues of the old elite (though these characters exhibit little nostalgia), but also show how official corruption operates (especially for one riding the tiger and knowing that falling off or dismounting would lead to being devoured immediately by the tiger).

Portraying forthrightly torture, abortion, homosexuality, Islamism, and official corruption are daring in any Arab society. The first-time director adheres very closely to the novel, but the movie seems more ramshackle than the book. (165 minutes is longer a movie than 245 pages is a book--and the English release version is 172 mibutes.) The book was a long-term best-seller and the movie broke all box office records in Egypt, as well. The romance is surprisingly touching, and the actors are effective. Call it 'soap opera," call it "melodramatic," but I think that it shows a lot about the society, the ruthless state security apparatus, and what turns some ordinary young men into Islamist killers.

There are no DVD bonus features, not even a trailer.

© 2008, Stephen O. Murray



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD