Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 08/29/24

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Thursday, August 29, 2024

The Sixth Day (Youssef Chahine, 1986)

Dalida in The Sixth Day

Cast: Dalida, Mohsen Mohieddin, Shouweikar, Hamdy Ahmed, Sanaa Younes, Salah El-Saadany, Mohamed Mounir, Youssef Chahine, Abla Kamel, Hasan El-Adl, Maher Esam. Screenplay: Youssef Chahine, Hasan Al Geretly, based on a novel by Andrée Chedid. Cinematography: Mohsen Nasr. Production design: Tarek Salaheddine. Film editing: Luc Barnier. Music: Omar Khairat.

The French-Italian pop star Dalida, who was born in Egypt, plays Saddika, a middle-aged woman living in a village during the cholera epidemic of 1947. She takes in washing to support her second husband, who is disabled, and her small grandson. Saddika catches the eye of Okka (Mohsen Mohieddine), who is 20 years younger. He's a street performer who works with a trained monkey, and he idolizes Gene Kelly -- to whom the film is dedicated. Okka doesn't have Kelly's talent as either a singer or a dancer, as a fanciful musical interlude demonstrates, but he is energetic in his wooing of Saddika. When her grandson is stricken with cholera, he helps her hide the child from the public health authorities. A bounty is awarded to anyone who reports a cholera victim, and the village is alive with people willing to snitch on their neighbors. Saddika may have good reason to conceal the boy's illness: The sick are taken to a site in the desert that is rumored to be nothing more than a death camp. The film's title comes from the belief that if you survive six days with the disease you're in the clear. Saddika and the boy end up on a river boat accompanied (reluctantly on her part) by Okka. The Sixth Day is mostly coherently narrated, and it has some fine moments of comedy and suspense, but it also contains some incidents that don't quite fit the main story. I'm not sure, for example, what's going on in a scene in which a drunken British soldier is hustled into a bright red car whose passengers are women. Dakka witnesses the incident, but it's not clear what it has to do with his story or Saddika's. I suspect that it's a scene in Andrée Chedid's novel that Youssef Chahine didn't quite integrate into his screenplay.