Year: 2012
Genre: Drama
Directed:
Yusri Nasrullah
Stars: Menna
Shalabi, Bassem Samra, Nahed El Sebai, Salah Abdallah, Phaedra Al-Masri,
Abdallah Medhat, Momen Medhat
Production:
France 3 Cinema
Sometimes
context can enrich a movie watching experience. In the case of the Egyptian
movie After the Battle, the context is the experience. It’s everything to the extent
that the movie, its characters its events and its cinematography are all
dependent on knowing about a place in time. Additionally the clear and broad
emotions therein, the anger, the disappointment, the resentments all comes
boiling over in this film with the fervor of a witch’s cauldron. After the
Battle is not a good movie but it is a decent snapshot.
The film
takes place during the Arab Spring – specifically between the events of the
February Tahrir Square protests in Cairo, Egypt and the Maspero television
building protests along the Nile on October 9, 2011. To democratically minded
Egyptians, the summer of 2011 was a time of possibility. The secular forces
that initially sparked the Egyptian Revolution were eager to run their own
candidates in the first free and fair elections Egypt had ever had. But to
laymen like horseman Mahmoud (Samra), the revolution has only given him
hardship and thrown his community into chaos and confusion.
Earlier that
year, Mahmoud and his fellow horsemen attacked the protestors at Tahir Square
to, in his own words “protect [their] livelihood.” After the resignation of
President Hosni Mubarak, the rest of the horsemen have stayed quiet and
apolitical. But because Mahmoud had fallen off his horse and gotten his face on
TV, the rest of his community has ostracized him and his family. Thus Mahmoud
is forced to depend on a modern-thinking divorcee and passionate young turk
named Reem (Shalabi) to get him and his family out of the rut they’re in.
She's Egyptian, young turk is just an expression... |
The film is
a feral mix of On the Waterfront (1954)-type melodrama and Danton (1983) level
political posturing, with a little bit of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) mixed
in for effect. It goes about as good as you’d expect from a film that lends the
tale a cinema verite intimacy that pays more attention to arms flapping about
than real emotional payoffs. What’s more, the movie touches on many fault lines
in Egyptian culture and the body politic but never develops any of them beyond
being window dressing. Thus the melodrama intensifies and intensifies without
bringing any new dimensions to the story.
As the film
intensifies, the believability of the characters diminishes to the point of
everyone looking like stock-types. Mahmoud is a simpleton in need of political
awakening. Reem never internalizes her own hypocrisy and instead becomes a
do-gooder nuisance. There’s the feckless crony capitalist, the besmirched wife,
the ambivalent working-stiff – heck if Maxim Gorky gave this script a look he’d
throw it out as a work of amateurism; socialist realism – more like socialist
soap.
Yet one can’t
help but imbue After the Battle with the slightest bit of value despite its
faults. The film was released in its native Egypt in the fall of 2012, just
after the ascension of the Muslim Brotherhood backed Mohamed Morsi as
President. Within the span of its production, After the Battle saw the idealism
and socio-economic flux of the post-revolution era morph into something ugly,
something intolerant and ultimately something undemocratic.
Thus when I
say After the Battle is a decent snapshot, I mean that it captures the simplistic
zeal of the revolution while unknowingly (though their treatment of Mahmoud) pointing
towards it failures to address the problems of the everyday Egyptians. It’s
almost by default that this film ends up being the best movie of its type since
Memories of a Mexican (1950). That still doesn’t mean it’s worthy of a
recommendation though historians may have to take note for the sake of
recording the whims of the moment.
Final Grade:
D
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