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| Mahmoud Al Meleji and Ezzat El Alaili in The Land |
I will only betray my ignorance of Egyptian history, literature, politics, and culture, not to mention the Arabic language, if I venture to say more than that I found Youssef Chahine's The Land both stirring and baffling. I may have been baffled occasionally because The Land is based on a novel, and Chahine chose to include some sections that may have worked better on the page, such as the opening sequence about a boy's infatuation with the pretty Wassifa (Nagwa Ibrahim). Chahine spends much time establishing a backstory for the boy, but he disappears from the rest of the film after his sequence ends. But narrative flaws like that one shouldn't deter anyone from watching the film, which is often quite beautiful and features some impressive performances, particularly that of Mahmoud Al Meleji as a farmer struggling with the intractable demands and corruption of government authorities, with the ambitions of his landlord, and with the apathy and ineptness of some of his fellow farmers. The action moves through incidents both comic and brutal, and ends with a masterly final scene that evokes the work of Eisenstein and Dovzhenko. The rest of the film isn't on a par with its ending, but that's probably asking too much.
