Chicago International Film Fest

by Anna Pulley

The Yacoubian Building (Omaret Yacoubian, Marwan Hamed, Egypt)

A sonorous three-hour epic into the agonies of five Egyptians braided together by corruption, bitterness, and festering urgency, The Yacoubian Building is a scathing depiction of modern-day Egypt’s urban and moral decay since the Revolution of 1952. Based on the best-selling novel by Alaa Al Aswany (whose first profession is dentistry), the Yacoubian building is an actual building in downtown Cairo, where it once housed government officials, foreign bigwigs, and loaded entrepreneurs. Now the building houses a number of mixed-income tenants from hustlers and destitute families on the rooftop to the wealthy Editor-in-Chief of Cairo’s major French newspaper Le Caire. The building also acts as the central hub which all the sub-plots of the film revolve around.

 
Zaki (Adel Imam) is a skirt-chasing, retired engineer whose office is in the Yacoubian. He represents the pre-Revolutionary elite with his genteel manners, Western education and imperviousness toward the poverty around him. Taha (Mohamed Imam) is the son of the Yacoubian’s doorman, idealistic and stoic, who is denied entry into the Police Academy because of his father’s lowly profession. Spurned by society and his childhood sweetheart, Bothayna, Taha eventually turns to an Islamic militant group with the singular aspiration of vengence. Bothayna (Hind Sabry) is a virtuous, beautiful and disaffected young woman who refuses to give in to the accepted (indeed expected) sexual harassment perpetrated by her male employers. Forced to help her widowed mother survive the injustices of poverty and sexual discrimination, a resentful Bothayna eventually accepts employment with Zaki, whom she’d been planning on double-crossing but ends up falling in love with him instead. Haj (Nour El-Sherif) is a shoe-shine-turned-wealthy-car-dealership-owner whose lascivious yearnings force him to marry a young widow in secret and then coerce her into an abortion when she becomes pregnant. Due to his involvement with the People’s Assembly, which is steeped in bribery, hypocrisy and corruption, Haj gleefully tumbles down into the pratfalls of ethical obliteration. Finally, Rashid (Khaled El Sawy) is a closeted but respected Editor-in-Chief and sugar daddy to a young soldier. His sexuality is his identity and he will ultimately pay for it. Considering the government censorship and strict adherence to coded taboo in Arabic cinema, the portrayal of a gay character in The Yacoubian Building is something of a triumph, despite the fact that he is murdered by a potential lover and that his homosexuality is suggested to be a result of childhood neglect.
 
A luxurious, almost exhaustive, rendering of a society in shambles, The Yacoubian Building is beautifully orchestrated, with sweeping long-takes, stunning slow-motion placement and an all-star cast of highly accredited performers. “This is the age of deformity,” says Zaki, in a drunken diatribe that metaphorically sums up the political and personal dystopia of the film’s interlocking characters. The Yacoubian building is a place of exploitation, of a generational, sexual and class divide that is bridged in the final scene when Bothayna and Zaki are married and are at last able to leave its premises, positing a hopeful outlook for a less troubled civilization.

The Zero Years (Nikos Nikolaidis, Greece)

A dystopian portrayal of four women who’ve been sterilized by the government and imprisoned in a decrepit S&M brothel, The Zero Years is a bleak, semi-pornographic incubus that completes Nikos Nikolaidis’s trilogy, “The Shape of the Coming Nightmare” (the first two being Eurydice BA 2037 and Morning Patrol). This trilogy has taken over three decades to complete and is supposed to symbolize the gradual dissolution of society as we know it. The Zero Years represents the universal culmination of cultural, economic, social and political atrophy in the modern world, which is partially why the title is in English, to have a more widespread effect on viewers.

The film is set entirely inside a dilapidated state-run brothel where the four women live, serve their sentences, beat men until they’re unconscious or dead, and conduct elaborate reproduction rituals to contend with their sterility and incarceration. The rituals they perform, which include simulated miscarriages, putting diapers on a one-legged doll, and smearing raw egg embryos over each other’s breasts and faces (which is supposedly a nod to J. Lee Thompson’s 1962 version of Cape Fear) as punishment further contribute to the over-arching metaphor for the sterilization of ideas, political freedom, and imagination in Nikolaidis’s ominous netherworld.

The use of eroticism to convey existential philosophy and moral chaos was wholly unconvincing, however, and I felt at times that I was watching late night Cinemax instead of a brooding, futuristic nightmare of cultural purgatory. It is something of a challenge to analyze one’s doom when four excruciatingly hot women are practicing how to fake an orgasm, replete with eye-crossing, finger-sucking and whimpering animal noises. Maybe it’s just me though. The incredible performances of the lead actresses, notably Vicky Harris (who was at the screening) and Maro the Whip (Arhontissa Mavrakaki), transcended some of the film’s titillation and made the viewing more tolerable. 

The pace of the film is listless and tranquil, a projection of narcotized episodic apathy, which fits beautifully with the flat-toned voices of the actresses and themes of nihilism. There is no sense of time lapse or progression, each scene fades away into another, like a lucid dream, which also accounts for the lack of a coherent plotline. A few footnotes to the plot involves Maro’s abduction of a client, whom she kidnaps for the delusional purpose of bearing his child, a repeating black and white scene of four little girls crawling out of a gutter, and Vicky’s impending release from the institution. The little girls appear to represent ghosts of the children they never had or actual ghosts that haunt their apartment, neither are ever explored much in the film. Vicky’s release from the brothel and inevitable return point to the idea that nothing exists outside of the institution, and the relationships and rituals that sustained her in the brothel are more fulfilling than the “freedom” of the outside world. The film concludes with the four women eating dinner together, along with Maro’s barely conscious sperm bank. Christina (Eftyhia Yakoumi) un-ironically remarks, “I was just thinking how beautiful it is that we’re all together again.” The companionship they have for each other outweighs the bleakness of their surroundings. Dubbed an “erotic film noir,” The Zero Years reads more like fantasy than a critique of civilization, an oversexed inferno of longing, habit and delusion better suited to the night owls than the nihilists.