The Yacoubian Building (2006)

Some films are strange in good ways and some films are strange in bad ways. Sadly, The Yacoubian Building (dir. Marwan Hamed) belongs mostly to the latter category. This film combines soap-opera drama with social critique and then on top of that the director has thrown in a few noisy action scenes just for good measure. I'm not sure where the film intends to go and I could see that there was a lot on the director's mind; he seems to have wanted to make a film that compiles many different aspects of urban Egyptian life. It's just that too often I feel that the way the subjects are dealt with end up being rigid sketches, sometimes too soapy and sometimes I suspect that the entire approach is shady (this goes especially for the film's treatment of gay characters). The story starts from one building in Cairo and follows several of its residents (among them an ageing playboy, a wealthy businessman who buys a wife, an schoolboy with the aspiration to join the police forces who turns into a religious extremist, a gay journalist). We sense that many things have changed in the building and that life in Cairo is also changing. Hamed wants to comment on everything: on poverty, on sexism, on love, on corruption among politicians, on homosexuality and on the relation between 'European' culture and Egyptian culture. And religion, which is here seen as always standing dangerously close to extremism or it is a mere surface phenomenon in a person who leads a double life. The portrait of Egypt is dark, but there are openings. It is impossible to miss the attempt made by The Yacoubian Building to reject official images of Egypt. Its striving seems to be "telling it like it is". There's nothing wrong with that kind of urgent need to defy and disclose for example corruption and hypocrisy. But the film's vision and stand on moral and political question appear far from lucid (to be honest, I found the attitude it adopted both resentful and moralistic), and as a film, The Yacoubian House is too long and its scope is perhaps too big.