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

Search This Blog

Tuesday, June 16, 2026

Return of the Prodigal Son (Youssef Chahine, 1978)


Cast: Shoukry Sarhan, Ahmad Mehrez, Hasham Selim, Majida El Roumi, Souheir El Moshdy, Huda Sultan, Mahmoud el-Meliguy. Screenplay: Salah Jahine, Farouk Beloufa, Youssef Chahine. Cinematography: Abdel Aziz Fahmy. Film editing: Rashida Abdel Salam. Music: Hassan Abouzeid, songs: Salah Jahine. 

A family serves as a microcosm of Egypt's political and social crises in Youssef Chahine's Return of the Prodigal Son. The prodigal son of the title is Ali (Ahmad Mehrez), who returns to his family after a 12-year absence, his experience in the larger world much sought after by the dysfunctional community he left behind under the leadership of his ruthless older brother, Tolba (Shoukry Sarhan). It's a melodrama with striking shifts in tone, some of them created by interpolated musical numbers. These give the film a hopeful lift when the social and personal problems overwhelm its characters, particularly the two young people, Ibrahim (Hesham Selim) and Tafida (Majida El Roumi), caught in the maelstrom of family antagonisms. The film is a mixture of the actual and the symbolic that sometimes doesn't work but leaves a strong impression anyway.

Posted by
Links: ,