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“Don’t bite your masters, dog!” (Ratib Bey, The Kidnapped Girl)

The quote in the title comes from the film al-Makhtufa/The Kidnapped Girl (Sharif Yahya 1987), and perfectly explains the social critique of these films and the subjugated positions the anti-heroes occupy. The films with an underdog main male character are pessimistic films about the present with a negative outlook for the future: in the end, the anti-hero dies, enters prison, or loses everything he worked so hard for during the film. The films emphasize the underdog position that these men possess, for example through insults like the quote above signaling a strong class divide that even reminds of the country’s colonial past. In social realist films from the 50s and 60s it was not uncommon to hear a similar tone from the ruling classes addressing the working and lower classes in films set in feudal Egypt.

In the introduction to this chapter I mentioned the emergence of a new realist cinema, a tendency that had started already in the 1970s with directors like ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Khaliq, Ashraf Fahmi and ‘Ali Badrakhan (Abu Shadi 1998: 23-5). Whereas films in the 70s had to deal with the new reality of Sadat’s economic infitāḥ, the 80s directors dealt with its effects: a polarized society with a growing class divide, unfit housing for the poor, a pauperizing middle class and the increasing morality of money, a feature already emerging in the 70s. While the futuwwa-films talked about this indirectly and metaphorically – they were situated in an undated past – these contemporary films tackle those issues head on. Of course not all men in films from this era are either historical futuwwāt or contemporary underdogs. A notable exception in the realist films of this period is Khayri Bishara’s al-Tawq wa-ʼl-Iswirra/The Necklace and the Bracelet (1986). It is a film set in the rural south of the 1930s about a strong, Ṣa‘īdi (southern-Egyptian) man, but who is unable to sleep with his wife and ultimately blames her for his impotence. The film is not only set in the past, it for once also portrays the personal

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struggles of that Ṣa‘īdi man’s sexuality, whose masculinity is otherwise ridiculed and the object of laughter in Egyptian cinema.¹⁵

The underdog-films have several elements in common, for example class and racial differences, generational conflict, or the anti-hero’s troubles with official representatives of the government or the law.

Police and police officers are not usually playing a positive force in the films, rather the opposite. In previous decades police were perhaps not pivotal characters in the films, they were nevertheless part of the modernist discourse and the presence of the state in, for example, traditional neighborhoods. Now they do have a more visible presence in the narrative, though mostly as a force that obstructs the anti-hero’s desires. In part this relates also to the films’ anti-modernist rhetoric, but more important here are the political implications. The police are not always actively obstructing the anti-heroes; rather mostly due to their passiveness and inability to implement the law, the anti-heroes are unable to receive what is rightfully theirs. The police’s presence is mostly necessary to emphasize the law’s siding with the rich, rather than with the ‘poor citizen’, al-muwāṭin al-ghalbān, that the hero embodies.¹⁶

The ‘poor citizen’, the anti-hero, also embodies the demise of the middle class, or in the words of Armbrust (1995: 105): “a middle class in danger of extinction”. He is a citizen who struggles to survive and provide for his family; his work ethic, that assumes the man is the

15 Ziad Fahmy (2012) attributes the Ṣa‘īdi’s negative portrayal in cultural products to their different dialect, different from the ‘standard’ Cairene Egyptian dialect. In popular culture like films or series and even jokes, the Ṣa‘īdi is often the object of ridicule, the “other” (Fahmy 2012: 8) inside the nation. Up until the present day these stereotypes – of the ignorant, violent, misogynist, extremist Southern male – are reinforced in comedies, dramas and action films.

16 The police’s presence in films has changed significantly over time:

undesired in the 1940s, heroicized in the 50s and 60s, corrupt in the 70s and 80s, they have returned to a positive representation from the 90s onward. The representation of corrupt officials is not omitted entirely in the recent films;

there is always at least one honorable high-ranking officer. The ‘bad guys’ in the police force are also associated with backwardness and ignorance, signaling a class divide within the police force as well. This way, however, films continue to ignore and deny the structural corruption and violence in Egypt’s Ministry of Interior.

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provider, is in danger. The male characters are either married and sole breadwinners, or they are unmarried and need to provide for a sick father or mother and several siblings all the while trying to prepare for marriage – a marriage crisis that will become an essential narrative element in future films and part and parcel of the discourse of crisis.¹⁷ They all have a job, however, sometimes even more than one, although usually in the informal sector.¹⁸ Central to this problem remains the men’s conviction that “work not only matters to men, but is also part of them as a key dimension of their identity and masculinity” (Edwards 2006: 7). It is an essential element, and being without work somehow emasculates them. Although Edwards’s claim is based on Western research, there are similarities with Egypt. Egypt, too, has recently witnessed privatization and declining work opportunities for men, not to mention the increasing presence of women on the work floor since

‘Abd al-Nasir, a policy that was continued by al-Sadat as well. Men thus felt threatened in their traditional role as provider, increasingly unable to adhere to that masculine ideal.

7.2.1 The Bus Driver

A prominent new-realist director who has directed several films with a pessimistic view on humanity and society is ‘Atif al-Tayyib (1947-1996), the director of Sawwaq al-Utubis/The Bus Driver (1982). He was greatly influenced by Salah Abu Sayf and other earlier realist film directors, but adapted cinematic realism to his own surroundings and time.

17 I refer here to Hanan Kholoussy’s commentary on the discourse of a marriage crisis in Egypt. She notes that the recent discourse (particularly since 2008) and the earlier one in the early 20th century point at anxieties that “have peaked whenever Egypt finds itself in the midst of socioeconomic and political upheaval” (Kholoussy 2010b, para. 12). Rather than investigating causes and concerns of the marriage crisis, the discourse about this assumed crisis is primarily informative regarding popular assumptions about this crisis. For example, as Kholoussy points out, focusing on the delay in marriage among young men and blaming women for this, assumes that women are passively waiting for an appropriate and actively searching male.

18 Informal sector jobs are extremely wide-spread in Egypt. It is estimated that about 40% of the economic activity is accounted for by the informal sector (Saif 2013, para. 1).This also means that those working in the informal sector have no social security, health insurance, or recourse to labor rights.

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Armbrust describes his films as “unsurpassed not only in laying bare thorny issues of sexuality, but in doing so largely within the conventions of commercial cinema” (Armbrust 1998: 31). Armbrust focuses on how men and women’s sexuality is controlled and contained in films by al-Tayyib, mainly by an autocratic regime, a conservative society or personal status laws that are applied by too diligent officials.

I will not look at sexuality in se, but rather how the anti-hero’s masculinity is constructed, whether in terms of his work, his sexual identity, and his family. Al-Tayyib’s films largely partake in the conventions of commercial cinema by using for example famous actors and actresses. But this element is but one of the reasons. His films mainly follow straightforward narratives with the usual ‘unlikely’

string of events, using melodrama to convey emotions and elicit the audience’s sympathy for the anti-heroes. But he also applies the ‘codes of modernity’, juxtaposing modernity and traditions, whether positively or negatively. This juxtaposition usually takes place in the modern city, which plays an important role in al-Tayyib’s films. It is, however, a dark side of the city as the setting where his characters live, work, eat and love. The film The Bus Driver is a good example of a film incorporating these topics, set within the corrupting surroundings of the contemporary city. But it remains an unknown city in the film; although the anti-hero moves around between Cairo, Port Said and Damietta, there are never really clear markers or famous landmarks – the city is an abstract and distant place. All three cities look rather similar, its streets and quarters not distinctive. New-realist directors Muhammad Khan and Bashir al-Dik wrote the film script;

this group of directors (it also included Dawud ‘Abd al-Sayyid, Khayri Bishara, ‘Ali Badrakhan and Ra’fat al-Mihi; Abu Shadi 1998: 25) regularly assisted each other in writing the script, acting in the film or in another way contributing to it.

In the film The Bus Driver we find Hasan (Nur al-Sharif), a middle-aged man working three jobs: a bus driver in the early morning, taxi driver in the afternoon, and occasionally helping out his father in the latter’s wood factory. He does not have a lot of money to offer his family a life of luxury, but they are happy. His wife Mirvat (played by

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Mirvat Amin) loves him and money is no issue for her. Mirvat’s materialist mother (played by Zahra al-‘Ula, famous for her roles as aristocratic and/or arrogant woman), however, has always opposed her daughter’s marriage with Hasan, considering he barely has money to buy her gifts or to get a decent flat. The class difference between Mirvat and Hasan is quite big; Mirvat’s family is relatively rich which explains their opposition towards Hasan. Their luxurious flat stands in great contrast to Hasan’s flat or his family’s dwellings. The crisis starts when Hasan is informed that his father (played by the tragic ‘Imad Hamdi) is about to lose his factory due to unpaid taxes. It is only then that the audience is informed that Hasan is a war veteran, perhaps to strengthen the audience’s empathy with the sad character and to link the film’s characters directly to political events in the country and the region and to the defeated men-motif of earlier films. As war veterans they were lauded and welcomed after the war for the victory of the Egyptian army. In real life, they were unable to bear the fruits of this victory.

Hasan is a good example of the underdog male; everyone seems to be against him, no recourse to any support except for his friends and in the end he is deprived of his sole purpose – his father and his family.

The city he lives in and his work are rife with crime; on a daily basis he is confronted with a robbery on his crowded bus and during a nightly ride in his taxi he himself is the victim of armed robbery – committed by university students we learn later. The film is thus typical for a post-infitāḥ Egypt where money talks and education is no guarantee for the future, hence the student-robbers. The film furthermore conspicuously sides with the working classes and not with the middle classes – now turned materialist – that had continued to occupy the white screen in previous eras. Hasan’s mother-in-law and brothers-in-law are all examples of that new ethic too, with their focus on money and disregard for their family. This does not necessarily make the film a conservative display of family values; on the contrary, the nucleus family is no longer deified but problematized in the film’s critique of a bourgeois ideology.

The presence of family in these films is often the source of a crisis, considering the requirement for young men to provide for their

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younger siblings and elder parents in an economy that had become increasingly competitive. The problematic family is a returning trope in films from this era, but also earlier films occasionally problematized the family as a support structure.¹⁹ While the crisis originated from an abstract and distant crisis in ideology, government or politics in the previous decades, in the 1980s the crisis has literally been familiarized and has entered the personal sphere of the male anti-hero in a very tangible form. The film’s focus on Hasan’s crisis and quest for money (for a good cause!) makes the viewer empathize with the anti-hero, even though his wife makes legitimate claims too. She wants a husband who is available for her, not someone who is only working to provide for them, critiquing Hasan’s way of defining his masculine identity through his work.²⁰ Al-Tayyib’s world is a paradoxical one; the characters’ sole recourse to safety is the family which is at the same time not at all supportive.

Hasan’s masculinity is fundamental for the film’s narrative. His masculine identity is centered on his conviction that he is the sole breadwinner. As soon as his father informs him of the impending bankruptcy, he takes it upon him to find a solution. His elder father is no longer able to do so, while he is the man’s only son among four girls. He then visits his brother-in-law ‘Awni, who works together with his father in the wood-factory. As the responsible for the factory’s finances, Hasan would like to know what has happened. Before he enters, the camera gives an overview of the living room where ‘Awni

19 Salah Abu Sayf’s film Bidaya wa Nihaya/Dead Among the Living (1960) is a painful example of this. In the film, the daughter of a poor family has to take responsibility for her younger, studying, brother after their father dies. The elder brother has found a new life in crime and women, but the younger has ambitious plans. The film does not end well when the younger finds out his sister had sold her body to provide for his studies. He kills her by forcing her to jump of a bridge, but a bit later jumps in the water as well, remorseful of his deeds. Contrary to most films of the era, this film’s fatalism is relatively odd, ending so abruptly and negatively.

20 Muhammad Khan’s film Zawgit Ragul Muhimm/Wife of an Important Man (1988), also with Mirvat Amin, is another beautiful example of a man (played by Ahmad Zaki) defining his masculinity through his work and his standing in society. As a police investigator, his position demands respect from those around him. When he loses his job, he perceives it as a loss of identity and personality.

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and Hasan’s sister Khadiga are eating through a medium shot. It immediately strikes us that their house is not too fancy, in contrast to the amount of food on the table for only two people. When Hasan rings the bell his sister opens the door. The camera pans to the right, following Khadiga to the door and giving an overview of the rest of the room: simple decoration, a couch under a closed window, and Khadiga’s sewing machine, all cramped together in this one small room. These details are important to understand that they do seem to have some money aiming for a middle class lifestyle (for example the rather large dinner on the table, and a simple, yet clean apartment), they are definitely not of the richest and are originally a working class family.

Up until now the camera has only offered us medium shots to include the surroundings of the characters, but as soon as Hasan and

‘Awni sit down in the latter’s ‘salon’,²¹ the camera cuts to a close-up of Hasan’s face, his piercing eyes scrutinizing his brother-in-law. He would like to know what had happened to the factory’s profit, considering they haven’t paid any taxes for the past decade. According to him, the factory owners he knows “have all built blocks of flats and drive Mercedes.” Hasan’s remark echoes the modernist tenets of progress and social mobility as they were depicted in the 50s and 60s.

In this cinematic context of the disruption of middle class ideals (Armbrust 1995: 105), progress and social mobility is the outcome for a lucky few while the middle class is hollowed out. The camera then cuts to a close up of ‘Awni, lighting his cigarette apathetically before answering: “You forgot about your sisters’ weddings, and the costs of mine and your father’s house?” Although Hasan does not trust him, he is in no position to blame ‘Awni of anything at this point. Then the escalating dialogue is paused when a medium shot shows ‘Awni standing up and walking towards the camera. But Hasan follows him, picking up the dialogue and threatening him. From ‘Awni’s evading looks, continuously walking away from Hasan towards the receding

21 The ‘salon’ is a reception room for guests usually with more expensive furniture, typical in Egyptian middle and upper class houses, similar to the Ottoman palaces’ salamlik where visitors were welcomed though with stricter gender segregation at that time.

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camera, we clearly understand that Hasan is telling him the truth, and that ‘Awni’s less than honorable business practices have been exposed.

The same techniques are used when he visits his other sisters: as soon as he enters the house, several medium and long shots allow us to take in the décor of the house, pointing at their presumed wealth that increases with each sister he visits. Compared to the rundown flat of Hasan’s father (including broken, unrepaired windows and flaking paint), his sisters’ dwellings are all examples of their lifestyles. His sister in Port Said – home to a duty-free port – has a house stacked with consumer goods. To cap it all, she offers him a can of Pepsi, symbolizing their love for Western consumer goods. This excessive lifestyle is continued when her husband and sons return and they eat an expensive dinner consisting of fish and scampi, a can of Pepsi for each, and a bottle of wine. The close-up of his brother-in-law filling Hasan’s cup to the brim – and then some more, spilling on the table – emphasizes their consumerist lifestyle; they have enough money, but no style. His third sister’s family is even richer, and their pretentious religiosity and nouveau riche morality does not compel them to help out Hasan’s father, either. This escalating exposé of each family’s wealth fits Viola Shafik’s assertion of a ‘fat cats myth’ (Shafik 2007:

275-80), informed by a middle class angst for lower classes climbing the social ladder without the cultural capital of the ‘old’ middle and

275-80), informed by a middle class angst for lower classes climbing the social ladder without the cultural capital of the ‘old’ middle and