Destiny
With Nour el-Cherif, Laila Eloui, Mahmoud Hemeida, Safia el-Emary, Mohamed Mounir, Khaled el-Nabaoui, Abdallah Mahmoud, and Ahmed Fouad-Selim.
With Mirlan Abdikalikov, Albina Imasmeva, Adir Abilkassimov, Bakit Zilkieciev, and Mirlan Cinkozoev.
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I don’t mean to suggest that movies from cultures as remote as these wouldn’t pose challenges for casual moviegoers, who might think watching them would be too much like going to school. But such challenges might often prove liberating and exciting–a vastly different experience from watching, say, The Matrix, which claims to be offering a new slant on how the universe works, though it’s recycling elements from just about every other SF action movie in recent memory. If any new ideas find their way into the mix, they’re inevitably obscured by all the shopworn trimmings.
Destiny may intermittently remind one of 50s studio productions as good as The Adventures of Hajji Baba or as mediocre as Kismet–it recalls a house style I associate mainly with MGM and secondarily with directors such as Anthony Mann, Richard Thorpe, Don Weis, Vincente Minnelli, George Sidney, and Mervyn LeRoy. Part of what makes this movie excitingly different is that Chahine has found a meeting ground for what he draws from Hollywood and what he draws from his own culture–a place where they can happily coexist and learn from each other.
I’ve seen seven of Chahine’s films and sampled a couple of others–most of them at a complete retrospective held in Locarno in 1996 (perceptively written about by Dave Kehr in Film Comment). But I haven’t seen the immediate predecessor of Destiny, The Emigrant (1994), a story of the biblical Joseph that was banned in Egypt under pressure from fundamentalists after an estimated 900,000 people saw it (the stated reason was that it was illegal to represent a prophet in a film). One of the key inspirations for Destiny–which ends with all of Averroes’s books in Andalusia being burned by the caliph as a concession to fundamentalist groups–was clearly Chahine’s own experience. If I’m not mistaken, the books we see burning in the final sequence are modern volumes rather than medieval manuscripts, which is part of the movie’s point. (Averroes’s writings survived because some of his followers copied them and sent the copies to Egypt–the medieval equivalent of copying films on video today, perhaps the major way the film legacy of the late 20th century is being preserved.)
This “carpet connection” has prompted some commentators to compare The Adopted Son to Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Iranian film Gabbeh, but I think the differences between these films are more important than the similarities. The ethnographic world of Gabbeh isn’t even remotely that of the filmmaker, who’s a talented and imaginative observer, and the somewhat touristic packaging of that world was in some ways Makhmalbaf’s calculated bid to “sell” Iranian cinema in folkloric and consumerist terms to a wider market; his effort succeeded, as did the similarly distanced efforts of Abolfazl Jalili, whose Dance of Dust has been a recent favorite on the festival circuit.
