Cairo Station

"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.

I believe Cairo Station marks my very first experience in watching an Egyptian movie (those television soap operas over the RTM channels when I was younger, don't exactly count). And having the opportunity to watch one made by an acclaimed Egyptian filmmaker, was nothing less than a bonus. What provided the icing on the cake, was that it was shown in 35mm print, and that is precisely the attraction of the World Cinema Series.

I was under the uninformed impression that older, black and white movies, will likely to be paced too slow for my liking, or have stories that are quite bland by today's standards. I was so wrong, and Cairo Station absolutely threw those notions out of my mental window the minute I experienced the first few minutes of it. It has an extremely strong story, sophisticated in that it managed to span multiple threads and had ensemble characters, having so much paced so nicely within its 74 minute runtime, and having them all come together neatly for the finale.

Having the events take place within a single day, it centers around 3 lead characters - Kenawi the newpaper boy (played by the director himself), who walks with a limp and gets discriminate against by the working folks at the train station (hence the English title), Hanuma the sultry, sexy soft drink seller (played by Hind Rostrom) and her beau Abu Sri (Farid Shawqi), a porter at the station who's galvanizing his fellow workers to form a union to fight for better wages and welfare. There you have the female lead in a familiar seductress role, an anti-hero, and the hero himself, caught in a love triangle, which starts to turn Kenawi's jealousy and having his love spurned, into a dangerous obsession.

Sounds like a Hitchcock-ian thriller? You bet! It's a dark movie indeed, one which explores the trappings of a misguided soul and his fetish and fantasies of beautiful pin up models, and because of his inability to express himself properly, gets frustrated and even with his relatively low IQ, starts to scheme to get his desires met. But it's not always all about Kenawi, as having the premise set in one of the busiest train stations, it allows for a number of avenues to introduce simple side stories to enrich the main narrative - every anonymous face in the station, definitely has a story to tell.

And what exactly was in the film that had made audiences back then upset? Well, I could offer a few suggestions, but by today's standards, it has seemed that it's already quite common, be it the water soaked clothing that accentuates a woman's curves, or a folio consisting of various scantily clad pin up models, or the many cleavage bearing shots, or perhaps some dancing and flirting amongst a train full of man, giving them that seductive wink? One wonders, but as with most situations, anyone seemed to have been crossing the boundaries, pushing the envelopes, or revolutionizing the way stories are told, would have met with either accolades for doing so, or unfortunate condemnation like what this film received during its very first screening.

But on hindsight, as always, this movie is nothing short of being remarkable. And having already watched it, I will be watching it again when the film screens once more to the general public on October 5th. Mark your calendars, and experience a world class production that has withstood the test of time - 50 years and counting, is no mean feat!

This is simply one fine movie because it follows a solid and involving story about simple characters, dealing with only seemingly small problems and frustrations.

This is actually a quite daring movie, from such a religious and strict country such as Egypt, especially for its time of course. Not that there is anything shocking in by any other standards but the main characters is a both mentally as physically handicapped one and the female lead is quite flirtatious and free-minded. Besides, the movie also casually has other themes such as female rights and abuse, not just toward women but also abuse from the bosses of the simple workers and denying them equal rights. But the movie is not preachy about any of these subjects at all and I like I said, it actually only handles it casually as the movie it's main story moves along. And the movie does move quite fast, which is not necessarily due to its pace but more because there is always something happening story-wise, with one of the many characters.

It's all being weaved in quite cleverly and effectively with its main story of the physically challenged peddler, who falls for the very attractive Hanuma, who is way more woman than he ever can handle. It's therefore also an already doomed love-story from the start and luckily the movie also doesn't have a fairy tale type of story.

It's a bit of an old fashioned done sort of movie, with also some unusual acting styles in it but this is what works quite refreshing at the same time. It's always interesting to compare movies from different continents, that got made during the same time period. Every country has its own strongly present culture present and also a different sort of film-making that goes along with it. This movie got made at the time period that is known as the golden age of Egyptian cinema. Many people don't seem to know this but during the '40's and '50's lots of worldwide critically acclaimed movies got made in Egypt, of which this movie is also one.

A great vivid movie, that follows a great story and has some solid characters in it.

8/10

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I don't really agree with certain circles who claim Cairo Station "one of the greatest films ever made" but it's a neat little film. It has that very basic, almost primitive, shooting style and editing which in some ways reminds of me Greek romance melodramas from the same time yet the perverse content sets it worlds apart from that kind of populist cinema which I suspect was as popular with lower/middle-class audiences in Egypt as it was in Greece. I liked that Chahine makes the titular railway station a stage for contrast between the old and the new. Between fashionable swinging Egyptians and the traditional Muslim conservatives. Between a lady president dressed in a modern pantsuit and destitute girls selling soda to the passengers. Between the old feudal faction of porters and the new one trying to assert its working rights by forming a union. This sociopolitical contrast touching on contemporary changes in Egyptian society (which, other than what the movie presents, I know nothing about but seem to be almost identical with the anxieties that surfaced in Greek screwball comedies of the same time) reflected in the movie itself, out of a typical melodrama of thwarted love Chahine dragging a dark noirish thriller with psychosexual undertones and an almost slasher-like turn in the third act replete with knife-wielding crazies chasing beautiful women that predates Psycho by a good two years. In borrowing the generic aspects of a programme picture for his character-driven piece and portraying his mentally imbalanced protagonist with sympathy and humanity, Chahine made a movie more wholesome than its 73 minute duration would suggest.

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