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One hot day in the wake of the Suez Crisis, "hotter by the minute." Youssef Chahine vigorously sketches the Cairo Station vortex with steam, whistles and swarming vendors and passengers, and plays the half-vulnerable, half-psychotic wretch at its center like a limping Curt Bois. The vagabond hawks newspapers (a gruesome murder is in the headlines) and adorns the walls of his shack with glossy pinups, his object of desire is the voluptuous peddler (Hind Rostom) who scampers across the tracks with a bucket full of sodas, just one step ahead of the police. "Crowds confuse me," he proposes to her but she has her eye on the muscled porter (Farid Shawqi) pushing for a labor union, all have gotten "quite used to trains and noise." Young lovebirds on the sidelines are a romantic melodrama enviously eyed by the protagonist, who dreams of bucolic domesticity but whose own life turns out to be closer to noir crime. Renoir's La Bête Humaine and Buñuel's El Bruto are the models for the excoriating view of Egypt in flux, with repressed obsession and raucous abandon for the clashing forces. (A dash of Miss Sadie Thompson puts a frenzy of guitars and accordions before dismissive clerics, "cursed be these modern customs!") Crisscrossing lines of action on the busy platform, the shadowy warehouse of the deranged mind, the shattered bottle and the dangling knife. Amid the turmoil (striking workers on one side, "Women Against Marriage" protests on another), Chahine's outcast aims for a murderous crackup and botches that, too. It comes to a close before a chugging locomotive, a nation's feverish anxieties brought to the fore only to be carted away in a straitjacket. With Hassan el Baroudi, Naima Wasfy, and Abdel Aziz Khalil. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |