la porte du soleil

This is far from being anything related to a movie review ofcourse.

I was anxiously awaiting the release of Bab ElShams in Egypt for a while now. I love to watch something different, and this one is certainly categorized as such, compared to most other Egyptian movies atleast.

Gladly, I found more people watching the movie than I had expected. I thought that those kind of movies last less than a week at the movie theatres because there's such low publicity and demand, but apparently not this time.

I got to see the two parts (and I'm glad they divided it, otherwise, 4 hours are just too much of anything), plus, the two parts are really very different.

I have nothing but praise for part 1. Loved the acting, the directing, the visual scenes, Nahila, the blind, telling to most Arabs, that no, Palestinians didn't sell their land, and most of all, showing the struggle and refuge with such a human perspective.

I just loved the ending of that part, when the Israeli officer was interrogating Nahila as to the whereabouts of her fida'e husband, and she denies that she knows. Then he asks her how come she's getting pregnant so frequently, and she tells him, "I am a WHORE, don't you have whores in your respectable country!". Saying (or pretending to be) that, got her off the hook in their respectable country.

A conservative/Islamist-leaning friend of mine came along to the movie, and he was pretty annoyed from all the love scenes, arguing that the movie diminished the Palestinian cause to just that. I thought my friend diminished the movie to just the love scenes. He couldn't make it to the second part.

As for part 2, I didn't swallow it very well. It was more like a documentary to me (which there are certainly better ones around). I can't figure out until now where the role of Shams relates to anything. She acts well, but I think her role was just superfluous and removing her role all together would not have affected the movie at all.

It seemed to me that the second part was catering westerners more than the first (both are really), but it was very obvious in the second part, especially with all the unnecessary English and French dialogues.

For some reason I found part 2 portraying all arab women encountered in the film as promiscuous (except for the adoring Nahila ofcourse)! I'm not sure why that was so, maybe that's supposed to be more appealing to the western viewer (I hope that wasn't the reason).

Also, part 2, which was named "The return" didn't really exemplify any return, since no one is really returning or even close to it, as opposed to part 1 portraying "The departure".

Overall, I think it was a great film. Shows that we still have good movie makers in Egypt after all.

The title of this post is in French because a friend of mine kept referring to the movie in French, and I liked the sound of it!