VARIETY
Viewers may ask why Youssef Chahine, the grand man of
Egyptian art cinema, chose to make "Chaos" in a style
akin to the populist films his fans usually rail
against. The answer surely lies in the message: Why
make a movie about police brutality and corruption when
the people who need to see it are filling the local
multiplexes? Visually flat and pitched like a soap
opera, "Chaos" is subversive precisely because of its
style.
The ailing Chahine had longtime collaborator Khaled
Youssef (whose solo credits include "The Storm") take
the helm toward the end of shooting; hence the
co-director credit. At the Venice press conference,
Youssef said he deliberately kept the style as close to
Chahine's dictates as possible, a point the master
himself seemed to support. Though attention has focused
on pic's condemnation of a corrupt police force,
Chahine and scripter Nasser Abdel Rahman (Yousry
Nasrallah's "El Medina") cast their net much wider,
implicating contempo Egyptian society -- and the whole
autocratic Arab world -- in fomenting the chaos of the
title. Pic opens with a demonstration in the
lower-middle-class Cairo neighborhood of Shubra, where
students are greeted by sadistic, baton-wielding cops.
Young D.A. Cherif (Youssef El Sherif) throws the cases
out, but police kingpin Hatem (Khaled Saleh) tosses the
students into a secret cell within the crumbling former
palace now housing the precinct. Hatem is a character
out of an Egyptian opera buffa, larger than life and
with a cruel streak bigger than the pyramids. He's in
love with his neighbor Nour (Mena Shalaby), a young
teacher with an unrequited crush on Sherif. The D.A.'s
mother, Headmistress Wedad (Hala Sedky), encourages
Nour, anxious for her son to ditch his trashy,
dope-smoking g.f. Sylvia (Dorra Zarrouk). But Hatem has
other plans and creates his own laws, culminating in
Nour's abduction.
Not
since his prescient warnings against fundamentalism in
"Destiny" has Chahine made such a forceful statement
about Egypt's catastrophic path.
"Whoever is ungrateful to Hatem is ungrateful to Egypt"
is the policeman's mantra, reinforcing the film's point
that such figures as Hatem aren't isolated bad eggs,
but products of system-wide failure. Through Nour he
also critiques the Egyptian education system, her lack
of English a further blow to any pretense at
self-congratulation.
Only by discussing these myriad asides does the full
extent of Chahine's damning critique become clear. He
skewers political parties and Islamists, all
uninterested in aiding their constituents unless it
leads to more power. He condemns a police force that's
run like an independent militia, meting out punishment
by whim and denying any recourse. Most of all, he
levels devastating charges against the past
half-century of autocratic rule, whose regimes have
destroyed civil society and made the average citizen
either apathetic or afraid to protest.
It won't be foreign auds who get all these points, but
rather viewers in the Arab world. Chahine has pitched
the entire film at the level of melodrama; nothing
feels real, from the back projection during car rides
to the over-the-top torture sequences. But he's getting
at larger truths, so that abortion, perversion and rape
become so much dress-up to the grander opera at hand.
Although visuals tend toward the one-dimensional,
complete with overly bright lighting reducing
everything to uncomplicated planes, there are still
moments of sweep, especially toward the end as the
outraged residents of Choubra take to the streets in a
stirring finale. Music borders on schmaltzy, but stays
in keeping with overall tone.