Gare centrale

"Cairo Station" is a very sad film...there's no getting around that. The story is tragic and when the film ends, you'll likely feel a bit drained...so don't day I didn't warn you. But I am not saying to avoid this Egyptian flick...it's well worth seeing.

The story begins with Madbouli introducing the film and explaining how me met and befriended Qinawi*. Qinawi was a poor guy with a limp without a friend in the world...so he adopted him and helped set him up at the train station selling newspapers. What follows for much of the film is showing the plight of all the many workers at the station-- the porters, women who work there illegally selling drinks and the rest. They get paid next to nothing and life is very, very hard.

About midway through the story, Qinawi approaches Hanouma and proposes to her. But he's poor, limps and seems a bit slow intellectually...and Hanouma is an obnoxious pig. So she laughs at him and belittles him for proposing to her! Qinawi is crushed...and soon has murder on his mind. Here is where it gets interesting because although everyone watching the picture knows murder is wrong, within many or perhaps most watching the film, there is a part of them that wants to see the coarse and horrid Hanouma die! This reminds me of the great 1944 film, "The Suspect"...where the audience naturally cheers for the leading man to kill and hopes he gets away with it!! I don't want to say more...other than the plan does NOT go as Qinawi hoped...and ends on a very sad note.

The film has a good story but there are other interesting things going for it. The camera-work is pretty amazing...especially coming from a nation not known for filmmaking. Many of the scenes have an almost film noir style to them with the lighting and camera angles. And, the film is rather daring--especially choosing to make the movie about folks near the bottom of society. Worth seeing.

*Like many films not in English and from countries with non-Western alphabets, there is no one way to spell the characters' names. The subtitles call him Qinawi and IMDb Kinawi...both are correct.

Well this right here is my idea of filmic excellence.

Set in a bustling train station in 1950s Cairo, it transcends its setting to tell a thoroughly engaging story. The director is like an anthropologist who is at once knowledgeable about how the characters and their situations are wholly peculiar to 1950s Cairo, and at the same time fully aware of how their stories and struggles are undeniably universal. At times the film flirts with romantic melodrama with its central love triangle. At other times it feels like a slice of classic Cinema Verite in its almost documentary-like rovings around the lower classes who make their living at the station. But at its core, it's nothing but an early psychological thriller about love and obsession (which, as a shot near the end emphasizes, can perhaps be seen as two sides of the same coin).

Made some sixty years after the Lumiere brothers filmed The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, it's hard to imagine that those early film pioneers would be anything less than impressed with what the art had become in the hands of this Egyptian storyteller. And sixty years after Bab El Hadid (aka Cairo Station), it's still hard to imagine a more enjoyable movie being set in a train station.

Calling any movie one of the greatest of all time is a vacuous epithet that ignores the subjective nature of enjoyment. That said, I can definitely see where those reviewers who call Cairo Station one of the "greatest of all time" are coming from.

At the crossroads of more than one thing, making it a fascinating film to come out of Egypt in 1958, and certainly shocking to its audiences. Chahine blends neorealism with a little Hitchcock in this story, and adds progressive elements that contrast with traditional Egyptian culture. Examples of these are the attempts of one man (Farid Shawqi) to unionize workers at a train station, the sexually free leading lady (Hind Rostom), scandalous at the time, and even in the cold drinks her character sells, which include western sodas like Pepsi.

The story centers on a lame newspaper seller (Chahine himself!) who obsesses over women in general, cutting out pinups to hang all over his shack, and Rostom's character in particular, despite the fact that she's already engaged and doesn't think much of him. The setup is brilliant and this one really had me hooked, though I thought it squandered some of its potential by not developing its story lines more completely, and narrowing in on the obsession too early.

It's an entertaining film however, not the least of which is due to Hind Rostom, who explodes on the screen. Her sassy character is seen soaking wet, dancing suggestively, and laying in a pile of hay with the implication that she'll have sex there, and the best part is that she's shown in a sympathetic light. In an interesting parallel, we see a group of women who are part of the Organization of Women Against Marriage, with one holding a book titled 'Free.' A contrast is shown in a woman in the market who complains to her husband that the lame newspaper seller has been staring at her, which causes him not only to beat the guy but also her, because it's "her fault" she didn't wear her veil.

The filmmaking here is top notch, with countless images and angles capturing the hubbub of the train station, including one in which a child is saved from being hit, which looked rather scary. There were also a couple images relative to the newspaper seller that I thought revealed his warped personality. In one of these, he looks through glass while his marital prospects are being mocked, distorting his face, and in another, he stands up after being rejected by the woman for not having a penny to his name, and we see a beautiful ancient statue in the background, a masculine figure looking not only healthy and strong, but content. He is a tragic figure because he's been shown empathy by the newsstand owner at the beginning of the film and because he professes the virtues of simplicity and dedication to the woman he loves, things which in a Hollywood film would probably have won out in the end, but not here. I can't say I loved how it played out, but I respected it, and am glad I finally saw this film.

It's not hard to see why "Cairo Station" was banned for 20 years in Egypt. It gained much recognition in Berlin, being nominated for the Golden Bear and Chahine missing out on the Best Actor prize on a technicality, but in Egypt the audiences, used mostly to the romantic comedies and melodramas Egypt's massive film industry was expected to release, found the film's darkly sexual nature disturbing, and the censors reacted in an even harsher manner. Expectations for the film were probably even further away from the finished product since the film starred Farid Shawqi and Hind Rostom, two big stars of the Egyptian cinema.

Everything you hear about the film from Chahine and from Egyptian film scholars suggest that he put his heart and soul into making this film. If the gritty yet stunningly well-orchestrated visuals don't convince you that's true, then Chahine's passionate, masterful portrayal of the main character surely will. It really is one of the greatest performances of all time, and that's fairly surprising coming from someone who chose to stay behind the camera for most of his long career. There's not a single moment where you don't completely believe the character and the character's motivations and feelings, Chahine is just THAT good.

The storyline itself is nothing to write home about unless you view it within the context of Egypt when the film was released. The film is very reflective of the pent-up frustration that many Egyptians felt (one could even say that inner turmoil of the main character is completely intended as a reflection of Egypt before Nasser took over), and the events surrounding the main plot are hugely reflective of the transition Egypt was going through (in one spectacularly stylized scene Qinawi looks on as rock n' roll is celebrated Egyptian-style inside a train carriage).

There are some brilliant moments throughout the film, but Chahine's handling of the final twenty-odd minutes are beyond brilliant. For one, he handles the change of tone spectacularly well, and his performance certain helps here. It's remarkable to watch a film directed by its star in which the actor's performance and the director's work feel so intrinsically connected- when Chahine the actor is dancing to rock and roll, Chahine the director is wonderfully playful, allowing the camera to move freely and capture the energy and enthusiasm of the scene. When Chahine the actor is at his most vulnerable and sexually obsessive Chahine works the film into a tense, spectacularly well-edited frenzy.

This isn't Chahine's first film, but it is quite possibly Chahine the auteur's first film. Although it contains a fair bit of Lang and a little Hitchcock (it is remarkably similar in its final stages to Hitchcock's "Psycho", which would only come out two years later, even some of the editing is similar), the film is mostly Chahine, looking at Egypt as only he can. "Cairo Station" is a film of remarkable depth, filled with great characters and wonderful performances, and featuring a spectacularly tense score. Beyond all that it is a film of immense technical precision and of unparalleled passion, and it is unquestionably the work of a master. A perfect film, the greatest Arabic-language film ever made, and one that I would personally rank as one of the greatest films made anywhere by anyone.

10/10

This is only the second "Arabic" film I have ever watched; the other one, several years ago, incidentally also emanated from Egypt: AL-MUMMIA aka THE NIGHT OF COUNTING THE YEARS (1969). The reason I have decided to return, all too briefly I might add, to that cinematic territory now is twofold: because I am purposefully catching up with acclaimed movies – the film under review is included in several authoritative "all-time best" polls – and it happened to be the late director Chahine's birthday. Actually, given his relative fame, I was surprised to find out that the only other work of his to be equally referenced was ALEXANDRIA...WHY? (1979) – which is not readily available to me at this juncture – and, for what it is worth, the only other film of his in my collection is the intriguing historical epic, SALADIN AND THE GREAT CRUSADES (1963) – which ought to prove ideal for inclusion in my annual Good Friday marathon. Amazingly, rather than being fêted by his compatriots for competing at that year's Berlin Film Festival (where it lost to WILD STRAWBERRIES [1957]), Chahine suffered the ignominy of having a film-goer spit in his face and the movie itself being banned until being rediscovered in the West 20 years later!

While the generic international title of CAIRO STATION does hint at the two schools of film-making to which the film could belong, i.e. Neo- realism and Film Noir, the original one of BAB EL HADID ("The Iron Gate" or literally "Door Of Iron") crystallizes the social, emotional and psychological trauma afflicting the main character of crippled newspaper-selling tramp Qinawi (an excellent performance by Chahine himself) who haunts the busy railway station lusting after clandestine lemonade seller Hanuma (Hind Rostom) who, however, is betrothed to a burly railroad worker and union man. Qinawi lives in a dingy room at the station that is literally covered with pin-up cut-outs of girls onto which he draws Hanuma's all-important bucket of lemonade bottles. The latter mercilessly leads Qinawi on but does not shirk from laughing in his face when he proposes to elope with her on the eve of her wedding. It is this rejection and imminent event which pushes him over the edge into violent retribution and mental meltdown.

The vivid recreation of the titular environment – with its many animated peddling characters and warring work factions – comes off as crude and chaotic during the film's "Neo-realist" first half but, once it centres on Qinawi and his fateful chasing of Hanuma, it becomes decidedly gripping and rewarding. I knew very little on the film's plot and themes going in and, frankly, I was not expecting things to turn out the way they did; while the railroad setting can be expected to remind one instantly of Jean Renoir's LA BETE HUMAINE (1938) and Fritz Lang's noir remake HUMAN DESIRE (1954), it was the surprising Hitchcockian (the knifing of the wrong girl whose body is being carried throughout the station in a trunk that leaks blood and almost topples open at one point) and Buñuelian (not just the fact that Rostom looks a lot like Lilia Prado but also Qinawi's obsession over her and a one-off display of foot-fetishism displayed at a much younger girl) elements which jumped out at me. Of course, I could not help recognizing several words in the dialogue - most effectively during the climactic cries of "Sikkina...sikkina" ("knife...knife) - given the Arabic language's semantic similarities with the Maltese one.