A week prior to the August 8 premier of Fish Eye at the American University in Cairo, a number of publications plastered their entertainment/arts pages with the Alexandria International Film Festival committee s refusal to screen the short film as a part of its digital films competition.
The board s decision was announced a month ago after independent young filmmaker Ahmed Khaled refused to remove three scenes from his second film. As it turned out, the controversy was pretty much unfounded, leaving the audience with an ambitious, intrepid work with numerous shortcomings.
The 20-minute film revolves around an unemployed middle-class Egyptian man in his early 30s who suffers from insomnia. The man, whose name is never revealed, is a classic Dostoevskian hero: An alienated, self-loathing, injudicious man leading a pointless, inconsequential life.
He hates everyone, including the male companions he hangs out with nightly at the atypical local coffee shop. Although he despises them, he s too secluded and lonely to give up his only interaction with other people. He waits by the phone everyday hoping someone would call, but no one does.
The hero occasionally stops by swankier restaurants to look at the other lonely souls lurking inside. He hopes to reach out to these creatures who share his pain and agony, but is too helpless to materialize his simple, small cravings.
He has tried everything to sleep: Sleeping pills, watching TV, and even masturbation, but all his efforts fall flat. The unanswered question that dallies throughout the film is with a life like that, does it matter if he sleeps or not?
Khaled s first short movie, The 5th Pound, was contentious for its scandalous subject matter of a veiled girl sneaking to the backseat of a public bus with her boyfriend to fool around. The drama stood out as the main attraction for the niche audience of Egyptian independent films which champions any taboo-laden movie, regardless of its artistic quality.
Apart from a scene that shows the main character masturbating and another that sees him exchange profane curse words with his chums, Eye is hullabaloo-free film with a straightforward storyline.
For my second feature, I didn t want to produce another film that deals with taboos, Khaled told Daily News Egypt. I wanted to direct an ordinary story that doesn t touch any social issues.
The larger part of Egyptian dramas is centered on stories related to the collective nature of society and individualism is constantly submerged under the web of social relations and communal-oriented problems. Hardly any film dared, or rather minded, to tackle the position of the marooned Egyptian man in modern, perfunctory society.
That s why Eye initially felt so fresh, but its execution was far less successful.
For starters, beyond his sense of desolation, failure and anxiety, the protagonist isn’t given any further dimensions and, as a result, appears incomplete on screen. He s an unsympathetic recluse without an objective; and it s difficult to sympathize without identifying the motives that drove him to this state. Or digging deeper inside his soul far from the customary, curtailed fear and anguish Khaled presented.
The most serious drawback is the excessive narration that accompanies the main character in his ill-fated wanderings. Egyptian cinema, and the independent one in particular, always succumbs to the temptation of words and Eye is no exception.
The distress that could have been expressed in clear-cut pictures is substituted by a long, repetitive, self-pitying inner monologue that doesn t provide substantial insight into the protagonist s psyche. It emerges as a glib method to create a link of compassion between the main character and the viewers.
Insomnia has been employed in movies like The Machinist, Insomnia and Fight Club as a cause of conflicts that surface. In Eye, the sleep disorder acts a pretext to tell the man s story but doesn t direct the course of the film, which feels lost near the end.
Emotional and social estrangement has been the main theme of American and Asian indies released in the past 15 years. Eye s forte, and perhaps saving grace, is Khaled s gift in creating some dreamlike visual sequences inspired by the films of Darren Aronofsky ( Pi, Requiem for a Dream ). The best shot in the film sees the main character waking up in front of a flood of sunlight that resembles a grand halo devouring him. There s plenty of subtlety, grace and alarming beauty that, alas, the rest of film lacks.
Khaled, a self-taught filmmaker, stated that his short films are essentially a medium through which he can learn and master his craft. His vision, albeit not mature enough, is sharp and singular; and his determination to break the current artistic mould is admirable. As flawed as Fish Eye is, it remains an experiment that might herald better works to come.
