5 ways to tell a Youssef Chahine film

For the second half of the 20th century, Arab cinema subsisted in the shadow of Youssef Chahine: a towering cinematic figure whose expansive filmography mirrored the changing face of Egypt from the fall of the monarchy in 1952 to the waning days of the Mubarak reign (Chahine died in 2008, three years before the 2011 revolution). 

Feted by critics the world over, Chahine nonetheless struggled to attract audiences at home, scoring his first bonafide commercial hit in 1994 with the Locarno-nominated Pharaonic drama The Emigrant starring Michel Piccoli. Winning the 1997 Cannes lifetime achievement award made him a national hero, despite ongoing clashes with the Sadat and Mubarak regimes. 

To several generations of cinephiles, Chahine was the Arab auteur, a filmmaker who succeeded in carving out a highly distinctive body of work from the ashes of Egypt’s fallen studio system. His is a highly personal cinema, which blends his existential concerns as an artist with the turbulent politics of the post-monarchy epoch. 

At once confrontational yet often politically naive, emotionally piercing yet maximalist in tone, visually polished yet narratively rough around the edges, Chahine’s oeuvre is a cinema of contradictions. It offers a dizzying kaleidoscope of colours and scorching romance and rousing musical anthems.

Although he juggled many different genres, a number of common themes, aesthetics and sentiments bind Chahine’s pictures. In the Arab world, these elements are commonly known as ‘Chahine-esque’.

More than any other genre, melodrama has had an indelible impact on Egyptian cinema. It’s the ideal vehicle for conveying the burning passions and animated nature of an expressive people habitually gravitating towards larger-than-life stories. 

Chahine’s international acclaim often obscured his perpetual desire for reaching a mass audience. For Chahine, melodrama was not just an artistic choice: it was the cinematic language he perfected to reach the masses. The intensity and political purpose of this language varied along the course of his career, reaching sublime heights in the 1960s with the Sirkian May-December romance Dawn of a New Day (1964), the rural epic The Land (1969) and the psychological drama The Choice (1971), his unsung masterpiece. 

On the flipside, Chahine’s use of the genre occasionally diluted his vision, especially in his later work, resulting in some of the director’s more self-indulgent later works, such as the All That Jazz-imitating An Egyptian Tale (1982), the Averroes biopic Destiny (1997) and the Romeo and Juliet romance The Other (1999). 

Chahine stretched and tested the limitations of melodrama. Among his peers, he was only one to temper his sensational stories with politics, touching on workers’ unionisation in Cairo Station (1958), the corruption of Nasser’s henchmen in The Sparrow (1972), and the rise of Islamism in the short Cairo as Told by Chahine (1991). His films in the wake of the Six Day War of 1967 count among the first examples of political melodramas in Arab cinema – a form that would greatly inspire subsequent generations of Arab filmmakers.  

Chahine studied theatre and TV at the Pasadena Playhouse in California in 1940s and was obsessed with Hollywood in his formative years. While his relationship with America disintegrated in subsequent decades with the country’s interventionist role in the Arab region, his love for Hollywood, and especially MGM musicals, remained undimmed. 

Throughout the course of his career, Chahine would direct various musicals, including the gleeful romcom You’re My Love (1957) – the most beloved of his early works in Egypt – the Lebanese theatre adaptation The Ring Seller (1965) starring legendary singer Fairuz; and the Fellini-esque autobiographical film Alexandria Again and Forever (1989), the third part of his Alexandria quadrilogy. Chahine seized any opportunity to have his characters break into song and dance.

His meet-cute romcoms You’re My Love and the underrated Between Your Hands (1960) also bear more than a passing resemblance to Ginger Rogers/Fred Astaire pictures. His ‘women’s films’ – Dawn of a New Day, Golden Sands (1966), Those People of the Nile (1972) – are laced with the alienation and ennui of Douglas Sirk and George Cukor. His noirs – Lady of the Train (1952), Forever Yours (1959), A Lover’s Call (1960) – echo Billy Wilder and Howard Hawks. The historical epics – The Devil of the Desert (1954), Saladin (1963), The Emigrant – are grounded in Cecil B. DeMille. 

The golden age of Egyptian cinema, which spanned three decades from the 1940s till the late 60s, boasted no shortage of great storytellers who captured the hearts and imagination of the nation. Chahine’s films, however, were undoubtedly the most visually striking of the period.  

The grandeur of Chahine’s melodramas was conveyed on screen via vast landscapes, warm colours, atmospheric interplay between light and shadow, deep focus photography, and highly dynamic camera movement. His maximalist melodramas were matched by sweeping cinematography that rendered every story in epic frameworks.

The more money Chahine received, the larger the magnitude and scope of his films grew. With the exception of 2001’s Silence, We’re Rolling, every Chahine picture from the 1976 allegorical musical The Return of the Prodigal Son till his last film – 2007’s Chaos, This Is – were big-budget productions. His frames were intentionally cluttered, abundant with multiple perspectives and visual codes pertaining to Egyptian life that harken back to the work of pioneering Egyptian painter Mohamed Nagy. 

Visually and narratively, his films occupy a middle ground between classical Hollywood and Bollywood: broader than the former and more tamped down than the latter. Above all, his visuals can be regarded as systematic attempts in capturing the Egyptian spirit on screen – a lengthy endeavour in finding harmony; in making sense of the spiritual, political and spatial chaos. More than any other filmmaker of the golden age period, Chahine created some of Egypt’s most indelible screen images. 

In a country fraught with countless incongruities, the human body always represented a conundrum to Egyptian filmmakers: worshiped at times, leched at in others, and shunned and derided in recent years. For Chahine, the body – both male and female – was always treated as an unbridled symbol of freedom: a multifaceted instrument encapsulating his longings, his romantic idealism, his carnal desires. 

From a bare-chested Omar Sharif’s leopard-like movement in The Blazing Sun (1954) and Hind Rostom’s sexually ecstatic dancing in Cairo Station, to Hisham Selim’s restless running in The Return of the Prodigal Son and Yousra’s erotic reclining in The Emigrant, Chahine’s characters are almost always unabashed about their romantic yearnings, their sexual needs, and their lust for life. 

Chahine’s sexuality remains a taboo topic in Egypt, largely discussed among a handful of liberal intellectuals. The obvious queerness, or bisexuality to be exact, of his alter egos in An Egyptian Story and Alexandria Again and Forever are indicative of a sexual fluidity detected in all of his work: from Sharif’s effeminacy in The Blazing Sun to Ahmed Mehrez rebellious gay aristocrat in 1979’s Alexandria… Why?

Homoerotic relationships between older, more experienced men and their green, young same-sex objects of affection are also featured in various films of his: the Soviet technician and the Nubian worker in Those People of the Nile; the French general (Michel Piccoli) and the two teenage boys in Adieu Bonaparte (1985); Chahine himself and his twentysomething actor protégé in Alexandria Again and Forever. 

Less obvious to the non-Arab viewer, if no less integral to Chahine’s cinema, is his atypical dialogue. Born to a Lebanese father and a Greek mother, Chahine was raised in the cosmopolitan coastal city of Alexandria and spoke five languages. His Arabic was noticeably softer and less articulate than his peers, teeming with the jargon and intonations associated with the Francophone middle-class of the time. 

For the first decades of his career, Chahine relied on scriptwriters. That changed with The Choice in 1971, which marked his first full foray in writing the dialogue himself. The schism between those two periods is quite radical. The dialogue of his studio films was more direct, more street-smart, more grounded in the social reality of their time. The dialogue of his subsequent independent productions by contrast was conspicuously mannered: over-expressive, florid, and deliberately devoid of naturalism. 

That change in direction had its merits, freeing Egyptian cinema from the prison of realism and adding new stylistic and emotional layers to Chahine’s rich tapestries. But it also had its fair share of pitfalls. Often the dialogue came off as hackneyed (a flaw the subtitles failed to cover for foreign audiences), overly earnest and distractingly forced. At best, Chahine’s dialogue vividly reflected his child-eye wonder; his fears and anxieties; and, above all, his Egyptianness. At worst, it was a hindrance, shackling his performers from carving out distinctive characters and rendering them all in the same voice. But it was also distinctively his: rambunctious, unruly and strangely poetic. 

Chahine’s cinema is imperfect, unpredictable, uneasily classifiable. The great directors of his generation – Salah Abouseif, Henry Barakat, Hassan El Emam – may have put their fingers on the pulse of the nation more astutely, but Chahine captured Egypt’s soul in stories and images that have lost none of their singularity and fervour. 

A season of Youssef Chahine films plays at BFI Southbank in July 2023, with a selection also available on BFI Player from 3 July.