Last Egyptian competition film is a major disappointment
CAIRO: First touted as the winning horse of the Golden Pyramid race, Egyptian director Emad El-Bahhat s feature film Hide & Seek might not even make to the finish line.
Everything about the film looked promising: a young amateur cast, a small budget and an original story. It was even compared to “Awqat Faragh (Leisure Time), the country s biggest ever independent film.
What Hide & Seek turned out to be was a pitiful soap opera-style rip-off of Sahar El-Layali (Sleepless Nights), the 2003 multi-plot blockbuster about adult romances in Egypt.
The film is a look into the lives of several characters: Youssef (Omar Mamdouh), a young movie director who can t find a producer to finance his film; his liberal ex-girlfriend Salma (Heidi Karam), a doctor who can t face up to her religiously conservative family; Moustafa (Nabil Issa), a bitter socialist journalist who thinks his friends are a bunch of spoilt, irresponsible kids; and Nabil (Hady Shinouda), the poor little rich guy who can’t find a purpose for his existence.
Rounding out the cast are Yehia, the old mysterious sea captain with a secret past who isolates himself in a remote village and Sherif (Ahmed Yehia), a dancer who can t get over his new bride Salma s (Sara Bassam) former sexual relationships.
The group gathers for Sherif and Salama s wedding and decide to play a game where they impersonate each another. As a result, some relationships collapse, others are reignited, but things can never be the same again.
The question is: do we honestly care?
The game, supposedly the only original aspect of the plot, is actually based on German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder s 1975 s Chinese Roulette. In Bahhat’s film it’s just a weak sell to an unsuspecting audience.
The film is basically a relationship drama about a group of unbelievable, unsympathetic, self-indulgent characters with tired confessions that have been written to death in the past six years. The characters are so unreal, I kept wondering what Heidi Karam might be wearing under the sheets in one of the scenes.
To make it worse, the film was too wordy with nothing remarkable to look at. There s absolutely nothing wrong with creating a film based on dialogue: Woody Allen, Ingmar Bergman and Richard Linklater created some of the greatest films in history with nothing more than a bunch of people walking and talking.
El-Bahhat s dialogue, sadly, misses the mark. Trite, tasteless and riddled with cliché, you end up laughing at some of the more “serious scenes.
With mediocre performances, except for Shinouda s genuine bit part and Nabil Issa s hilarious, yet profound depiction of a young man consumed by anger and self-deception, there was little there to grip viewers.
Perhaps the single redeeming factor in “Hide & Seek is a moulid scene (a folkloric Egyptian celebration). Beautifully shot, it proves that, with a good script El-Bahhat could show real talent as a filmmaker.
Hide & Seek is an earnest effort from a first-time director who has vision that was, unfortunately hardly visible in this film. The movie wasn’t just average, it was bad.
I was hopelessly counting the minutes and left the theatre with a shrug of indifference.
Earnestness doesn t necessarily translate into good work and if El-Bahhat is seeking to build a long, successful career, he need more than good intentions.
