Iskanderija, kaman oue kaman
Youssef Chahine (1989)
This isn’t so much a review of Alexandria: Again and Forever as an explanation of why I can’t write one …
Until I read Richard Brody’s summary note in the New Yorker a couple of weeks ago, I’d never heard of this film or of its writer-director Youssef Chahine (1926-2008), evidently a major figure in Egyptian cinema. (According to Wikipedia, it was he who, among many other things, launched Omar Sharif’s screen career.) The style and language of Brody’s highly compressed notes tend to make the films he recommends sound like the same film: this one was an appealing exception to the rule so I watched it on Netflix. I’m glad that I did and sorry that I can’t do it justice. Whether or not a film should be self-sufficient, I realise I missed a lot in this case through ignorance of Chahine and the other thirty-five dramatic features he made during a career of over fifty years.
The protagonist is Yehia Eskendarany, a famous Egyptian film-maker, played by Chahine himself. Yehia is the name of Chahine’s alter ego in several of his other films (where he’s sometimes played by other actors, depending on the character’s age). In Again and Forever, Yehia’s lifelong ambition to make a screen version of Hamlet is frustrated by the reluctance of his star actor, Amr (Amr Abdulgalil), to engage with the title role. Yehia recalls the happier beginnings of their creative partnership, with a film called Alexandria … Why?, which wins the Berlin Silver Bear. A film of this name by Chahine really did win that prize, in 1979. and there are references in Again and Forever to other Eskendarany films that were actually Chahine films. It transpires that Alexandria: Again and Forever was the third and last part of a Chahine trilogy, which began with Alexandria … Why? and continued with An Egyptian Story (1982).
Even if I’d known these things or other examples of Chahine’s work, however, I’d have struggled to get a handle on Again and Forever. This isn’t simply an autobiographical piece in which Chahine gives himself a pseudonym. There are autobiographical elements beyond those already mentioned. A major element of the narrative concerns a strike by members of an Equity-type trade union. As Richard Brody notes, Chahine led a sit-in and hunger strike by members of the artists’ union in Egypt in 1987; Again and Forever is dedicated to ‘all Egyptian artists and filmmakers and the fight for democracy’. But the film’s events also include things that didn’t happen in Chahine’s own life. When Hamlet falls through, for example, Yehia decides to make an Alexander the Great biopic instead. Its hero is played by Amr, though there’s no other suggestion that the rift between him and Yehia is repaired or that they’re working together again. Even if it isn’t Amr playing Alexander, it’s definitely the actor playing Amr playing Alexander. Either way, the casting is confusing. Yehia is bisexual and it’s clear enough that he and Amr are, or have been, lovers. That got me wondering if the Alexander film was a fantasy in Yehia’s mind: the biopic, as Brody says, ‘turns into an erotic psychodrama and slapstick burlesque’. But it’s not obvious that Yehia isn’t actually making it.
Still, I found Yehia’s feelings about his actors – the uncertain boundary between seeing them as potential players and potential lovers – the film’s most interesting theme. When Yehia notices actress and activist Nadia (Youssra) at a union meeting, it’s love at first sight: he becomes obsessed with pursuing a private and a professional relationship with her, as he did with Amr. Much later on, during a film shoot, Nadia notices the coup de foudre effect on Yehia of another young male actor on the set. Yehia’s wife Gigi (Mena Batraoui) has long experience of, though she’s hardly resigned to, his infatuation with particular actors. Nadia seems to interpret this rather differently, perceiving that film-making is so essential to Yehia’s existence that a dazzling performer is liable to take over his life entirely. ‘You worship actors, don’t you?’ she says to Yehia and his reply is a paean to their magical gifts – their ability to turn his words on paper into emotions on screen. Because Alexandria: Again and Forever is evidently so much about the man who made it, this exchange with Nadia naturally inclines you to think Yehia is speaking for Youssef Chahine. But you can’t help noticing too that Chahine, as an actor, shows much more range and depth than anyone else in the cast (impressive though Youssra also is). The twist that gives to this starry-eyed view of actors is another puzzle of a singularly bewildering film.
16 September 2020
