a matter of perspective
by
Douglas Messerli
Mohamed
Abu Youssef and Abdel Hay Adib (writers), Youssef Chahine (director) باب الحديد (Bāb al-Ḥadīd), (Cairo
Station) / 1958
Yet the film is a sprawling neo-realist-like
drama that engages us with the workers, travelers, and others inhabiting and
visiting the vast Cairo Train Station, gradually spinning into a Hitchcock-like
thriller that pre-dates Pyscho, the
film it most resembles.
This quartet of characters is what truly
drives Chahine’s epic story, and shifts it from a kind of generalized portrait
of train-station life to a tense murder mystery worthy of our attention.
Particularly through the relationship
of the gentle Madbouli and the outcast Qiawi, we begin to perceive not only
that something is amiss, but that “the boy” Madbouli has taken in has two
personalities. On the surface he is a kind and believing dimwit, but within
deep passions are stirring, and when he is mocked—as he is throughout this
film—he becomes something closer to Hitchcock’s Norman Bates than to a simple
street urchin.
We first begin to notice this when we
see him not only cutting “out” the newspaper beauties that line his walls, but
later beginning to cut them “up.” And, after hearing of a murder
in which a woman
was stabbed, cut up with a butcher knife and placed in a wooden crate, the kind
boy is transformed into a would-be monster, particularly after admitting his
love and dreams to Hannuma, which she rejects, trying to help him perceive the
absurdity of his plans.
Ready to leave by train with Abu Siri for
her wedding—a theme repeated in reversals throughout the movie—Hannuma packs
her trousseau, while Qiawi finds his own crate, pretending to use it for
Hannuma’s transport of her possessions. Chased by the police, Hannuma has been
forced to hand over her incriminating drink bucket to Qiawi, and he suggests
she visit him in a nearby warehouse where he has placed it. But at the last
moment, in a hurry to catch the train, she sends another friend to fetch it. In
the dark of the warehouse, Qiawi does not notice that it is not Hannuma come
for the bucket, and reaches out with a recently purchased butcher knife to stab
the unknowing victim again and again before shoving her body into the crate and
locking it up. As one reviewer wrote, you might have thought Hitchcock had seen
this film, repeating elements in his Psycho,
if you didn’t know the work was generally unavailable.
The last few chase scenes of this movie
are incredibly intense, as Qiawi again tries to attack Hannuma as she attempts
to fend him off to save her life, the entire series of intense intercuts
ending with both
characters on the railroad tracks, Qiawi holding a knife over her as the mob approaches.
Only the gentle Madbouli, now the boy’s surrogate father, can convince him that
the marriage about which Qiawi is obsessed is now blessed, and will take place
immediately, if only he put on the robe prepared for him; as the boy stands in
near-ecstasy, others slip him into a straight-jacket as he is carried off.
The strange voyages we have encountered
in this film seem to be but a few mad days in a world of such intense cultural
shifts and class and social differences that we wonder whether they might ever
be mended, a question we still might ask about Egyptian culture today.
Combining these broader tensions with the
inner turmoil of a young man, a bit like Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (there are several scenes, in fact, where Qiawi is
truly caught “peeping” at women, spellbound by their bodies), who knows he may
never consummate his sexual desires, Chahine has created in Cairo Station a brooding masterpiece
that speaks of cultural wars which all demand insiders and outsiders, people
who are blessed and those who are not. But we also realize through the
director’s kaleidoscopic vision, that these differences are often simply a
matter of perspective.
Orange,
March 10, 2017
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