There’s nothing special about being a child of globalization. In fact, it’s rather mundane. If I had to count how many of my friends and family are the products of cross-cultural backgrounds, were refugee immigrants, belong to minority religions, or happened, through one reason or another, to be bilingual, I’d be here all day.
I remember reading a poem in secondary school about a Pakistani girl and a Salwar Kameez (traditional dress worn by both women and men in South Asia) her aunts brought her from Pakistan. My Pakistani friends weren’t particularly impressed, or touched; for them it wasn’t really an issue. But for young filmmaker Robert Beshara, it is.
Perhaps it’s because the ‘identity’ issue is just beginning to snowball on the Egyptian art scene, I can’t say for sure, or perhaps it’s because Beshara is himself half-Polish, half-Egyptian. He is also concerned with the way globalization erodes indigenous cultures – or, more to the point, Americanization and its effect on the American University in Cairo’s students (Beshara is, himself, an AUC graduate).
His feature length film “Cryptic Reflection, premiering in Egypt at the Falaky Mainstage theater last Monday, was one, very long, even more ‘experimental’ exegesis on the woes of the American cultural influence in Egypt.
The film centers on Wahid, an orphan, whom we meet on the edge of the desert as he leaves his parent’s funeral. After a brief exchange with his friends – introduced by pretentiously would-be Bohemian subtitles as “an aristocrat – Wahid drives off with his best friend to get lashed and forget his sorrows.
If Robert Beshara had wanted to find a more obvious symbol for the post-modern spirit, he couldn’t have. Wahid means alone, in Arabic, and Wahid really is alone, as we learn that he has earlier lost a brother, Karim. He will also metaphorically lose his best friend to the arms of a girl when he leaves Wahid, out of head after “taking an overdose of alcohol.
Wahid’s orphan status is drawn directly from Saint Exupéry’s children classic novel “The Little Prince which prevails as a motif through the course of the film. It tells the story of a young orphan, who, stranded in the Sahara desert, comes across, among other things a fox who tells him that, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
It probably should be mentioned that most of the film is a dream. Wahid will wake up when he opens the door to himself to become Saeed (Arabic for “happy ), who is content with his Arab-Western self. If Beshara had tried to find a bigger cliché, he couldn’t have. But this is a personal film, and Beshara has appeared to base characters drawn from his own life, which, from what I can gather, is cross-cultural and artsy.
But it’s not so much the cliché that’s the problem. Sufism, key-discoveries, self-identity versus self-acceptance, and psychology versus spiritualism, are all oft played out themes. But as Beshara’s approach is fairly anodyne and self-explanatory, it undermines any vestigial sense of worth to these esoteric themes.
The film employs a strange mix of obscure, avant-guard images to try and build a sense of audience disorientation. At one point, there’s a short scene of a dog eating the insides of a dead horse reminiscent of great Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel sans the proper context. At another, the camera spins a nauseous kaleidoscope of fuchsias; emulating Saint Exupéry’s dehydration induced hallucinogenic experience in the desert.
Beshara uses the water motif to replenish his spiritual desert. As he wakes from a drunken stupor, Wahid finds his water bottles empty – again and again and again, just so we didn’t quite grasp the metaphor. As he makes his way outside, he is again approached by someone advertising psychoanalysis through white cards with the word “connect stamped on them. Thus Wahid makes his way to the psychologist where he, cue drum roll, finds his water.
He needs of course to lose his anger and his attitude – he admits to his Sufi-esque psychologist that he picked it up “when he joined AUC – to reconnect with his spiritual side.
Beshara, who shot his first film on and off over the course of three years, claims to have done deep research into psychology and Sufism. His conveying of these themes, however, is all too heavy-handed. Rather than allowing the viewer to tease out the meaning, Beshara shouts it out (usually with a few angst curses).
What does show though is his recourse to student antics in an attempt to be controversial and “way-out. After being asked for a brain scan, Wahid masturbates and takes his sperm in a paper cup to an attractive woman we can guess to be the assistant psychoanalyst, whereupon she drinks up his sperm, contemplates a little and tells him his ailment.
But Beshara does master the “dream effect well, aided by a shaky camera and overlong, and highly edited shots that leave the audience stranded in a no-man’s land: confused and slightly bored.
Beshara’s conclusion at the end of the film, when Saeed wakes up, is basically to learn to deal with your schizo-esque cultural baggage, symbolized by two ouds with a guitar placed emphatically in between. Revelation!
It’s the tale of the spirit overcoming the clash of civilizations.
I imagine some short, tongue- in-cheek sketchy piece could have pulled off such a cliché. Beshara, with his long, drawn out, and mercilessly crude existentialism, didn’t.
