World film project: Egypt, Vietnam
Jan. 23rd, 2022 06:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livWe got stalled on our world film project for a while, only managing two films in 2021 and then I forgot to write about the second. But we restarted this weekend with a Vietnamese rom com, so let me tell you about them.
This was a few months back now, but researching Egyptian films I found an adaptation of a book I'd enjoyed, The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany. Surprisingly it is available on YouTube in its entirety, with high-quality subtitles; I'm not sure how legitimate that is but I also couldn't find a way to give the film studio money, so.
Anyway, The Yacoubian Building (2006, Dir Marwan Hamed). is very good, with absolutely amazing acting from the entire ensemble cast. There are loads of characters who are flawed but sympathetic in really interesting and diverse ways. They are religious hypocrites or fundamentalists, and politically corrupt, and drug dealers, and they seduce people in the context of inappropriate power relationships, but also believable human beings who you care about. Adel Eman gives a fantastic performance as the ageing pasha, a womanizer who is still in love with his old flame.
It's a really startlingly good adaptation of a book which doesn't seem like it would really be filmable, at least not in a conventional Hollywood context, since there isn't really a plot so much as a slice of life of all the various people who live in the eponymous building. However, the book is a satire of Egyptian society and political corruption, and what comes over as dark humour in the book is horrifying when portrayed directly on camera. None of the women or gay men are really in a position to fully consent to sex and relationships; I like that the film doesn't gloss over or glamourize this spectrum from exploitation to sexual harassment to outright rape, but it isn't much fun to watch. The Taha plot arc is particularly grim; he wants to join the police but he is sidelined in favour of people with family connections that he lacks, he wants to become a religious Muslim but gets drawn into terrorism. The book alludes to his grooming by an Islamist cult, his torture by the police and his violent death attempting to take revenge on his torturers, but the film makes his miserable situation central and directly portrayed. Similar to lots of other horrible stuff including explicit sex scenes between people with impaired consent, and homophobic murder: it's not that these aren't present in the book, but they're a lot more in the background.
It's also three hours long, and I somewhat regretted coming back to it after we took a break part way through. A lot of the really explicit violence is in the second half and even though I had read the book and knew that most of the arcs were going to end badly, I didn't realize quite how downbeat it was going to be. So I'm not sure this was really the best choice of Egyptian film, but it is very good and something I wouldn't have seen if we weren't doing this project.
In contrast, How to fight in six inch heels (2013, Ham Tran) is frothy nonsense that made for an excellent low-brain date night movie.
It's predictable, it has all the obvious beats, it's yet another story where the heroine takes off her glasses and suddenly becomes hot, and she must learn to relax and be less of a control freak in order to win her true love blah blah blah. But unlike a lot of frothy rom-coms it genuinely likes its characters. Even the mean girl rival and the gay best friend are just really lovingly portrayed and everything about it that should have been annoying clichés came over as just really sweet.
The plot involves Anne disguising herself as a newbie fashion model as part of an elaborate plot to discover whether her fiancé is cheating on her with a fellow model. Her extremely camp brother, a make-up artist, helps her out while also being the voice of the viewer yelling at the screen to drop the cloak and dagger nonsense and just talk to eachother already! But unlike lots of other iterations of this obvious romance tale, the film takes Anne's career ambitions seriously, and although the narrative tells us that her besetting flaw is that she over-plans everything, actually what we see is her repeatedly saving the day by taking swift action in a moment of crisis. The hapless but basically decent fiancé Kiet is allowed to care about his own career and his own life as well as the relationship, and he gets a lovely emotional scene during the pre-happy ending fight. Like, it's ok for Anne to want to plan everything down to the last detail, and it's ok for Kiet to feel stifled by that, and they have to learn to connect with eachother in spite of their contrasting personalities, but without either of them being wrong to be who they are.
While it doesn't subvert gender roles really at all, HtFiSIH portrays a very positive, joyful femininity. The fashion industry isn't just stupid and fake, it's a real creative endeavour. The work that Anne does to learn to pass herself off as a hyper-femme glamour model is real work, and the work that she does as a business woman following her real vocation is also real work. OK, basically every male character except Kiet himself is a one-dimensional camp gay man, but apart from the villain who steals credit for Anne's designs, they're all just really lovely and sweet and again, being massively passionate about fashion isn't a bad thing for men either. The only thing that didn't quite hold together is how a fashion editor would be ignorant of the modelling world, but I was willing to suspend disbelief.
The Vietnam-ness of this film comes from Anne and Kiet being Vietnamese Americans with a flimsy reason to spend most of the film in Saigon. The people they meet there are a mix of urban and rural, as you might expect in the big city, and you don't get much character building but enough for them all to seem like real people, even the hyper-glamorous ones.
Next up: we are still missing Ethiopia, and next on our list is DR Congo. I expect both countries to be difficult, so would especially welcome any recs. Ideally we would like a feature film from the current millennium, actually made in the country rather than set there. But maybe we'll settle for a short or documentary or something.
This was a few months back now, but researching Egyptian films I found an adaptation of a book I'd enjoyed, The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany. Surprisingly it is available on YouTube in its entirety, with high-quality subtitles; I'm not sure how legitimate that is but I also couldn't find a way to give the film studio money, so.
Anyway, The Yacoubian Building (2006, Dir Marwan Hamed). is very good, with absolutely amazing acting from the entire ensemble cast. There are loads of characters who are flawed but sympathetic in really interesting and diverse ways. They are religious hypocrites or fundamentalists, and politically corrupt, and drug dealers, and they seduce people in the context of inappropriate power relationships, but also believable human beings who you care about. Adel Eman gives a fantastic performance as the ageing pasha, a womanizer who is still in love with his old flame.
It's a really startlingly good adaptation of a book which doesn't seem like it would really be filmable, at least not in a conventional Hollywood context, since there isn't really a plot so much as a slice of life of all the various people who live in the eponymous building. However, the book is a satire of Egyptian society and political corruption, and what comes over as dark humour in the book is horrifying when portrayed directly on camera. None of the women or gay men are really in a position to fully consent to sex and relationships; I like that the film doesn't gloss over or glamourize this spectrum from exploitation to sexual harassment to outright rape, but it isn't much fun to watch. The Taha plot arc is particularly grim; he wants to join the police but he is sidelined in favour of people with family connections that he lacks, he wants to become a religious Muslim but gets drawn into terrorism. The book alludes to his grooming by an Islamist cult, his torture by the police and his violent death attempting to take revenge on his torturers, but the film makes his miserable situation central and directly portrayed. Similar to lots of other horrible stuff including explicit sex scenes between people with impaired consent, and homophobic murder: it's not that these aren't present in the book, but they're a lot more in the background.
It's also three hours long, and I somewhat regretted coming back to it after we took a break part way through. A lot of the really explicit violence is in the second half and even though I had read the book and knew that most of the arcs were going to end badly, I didn't realize quite how downbeat it was going to be. So I'm not sure this was really the best choice of Egyptian film, but it is very good and something I wouldn't have seen if we weren't doing this project.
In contrast, How to fight in six inch heels (2013, Ham Tran) is frothy nonsense that made for an excellent low-brain date night movie.
It's predictable, it has all the obvious beats, it's yet another story where the heroine takes off her glasses and suddenly becomes hot, and she must learn to relax and be less of a control freak in order to win her true love blah blah blah. But unlike a lot of frothy rom-coms it genuinely likes its characters. Even the mean girl rival and the gay best friend are just really lovingly portrayed and everything about it that should have been annoying clichés came over as just really sweet.
The plot involves Anne disguising herself as a newbie fashion model as part of an elaborate plot to discover whether her fiancé is cheating on her with a fellow model. Her extremely camp brother, a make-up artist, helps her out while also being the voice of the viewer yelling at the screen to drop the cloak and dagger nonsense and just talk to eachother already! But unlike lots of other iterations of this obvious romance tale, the film takes Anne's career ambitions seriously, and although the narrative tells us that her besetting flaw is that she over-plans everything, actually what we see is her repeatedly saving the day by taking swift action in a moment of crisis. The hapless but basically decent fiancé Kiet is allowed to care about his own career and his own life as well as the relationship, and he gets a lovely emotional scene during the pre-happy ending fight. Like, it's ok for Anne to want to plan everything down to the last detail, and it's ok for Kiet to feel stifled by that, and they have to learn to connect with eachother in spite of their contrasting personalities, but without either of them being wrong to be who they are.
While it doesn't subvert gender roles really at all, HtFiSIH portrays a very positive, joyful femininity. The fashion industry isn't just stupid and fake, it's a real creative endeavour. The work that Anne does to learn to pass herself off as a hyper-femme glamour model is real work, and the work that she does as a business woman following her real vocation is also real work. OK, basically every male character except Kiet himself is a one-dimensional camp gay man, but apart from the villain who steals credit for Anne's designs, they're all just really lovely and sweet and again, being massively passionate about fashion isn't a bad thing for men either. The only thing that didn't quite hold together is how a fashion editor would be ignorant of the modelling world, but I was willing to suspend disbelief.
The Vietnam-ness of this film comes from Anne and Kiet being Vietnamese Americans with a flimsy reason to spend most of the film in Saigon. The people they meet there are a mix of urban and rural, as you might expect in the big city, and you don't get much character building but enough for them all to seem like real people, even the hyper-glamorous ones.
Next up: we are still missing Ethiopia, and next on our list is DR Congo. I expect both countries to be difficult, so would especially welcome any recs. Ideally we would like a feature film from the current millennium, actually made in the country rather than set there. But maybe we'll settle for a short or documentary or something.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-01-23 07:17 pm (UTC)The fashion industry isn't just stupid and fake, it's a real creative endeavour. The work that Anne does to learn to pass herself off as a hyper-femme glamour model is real work, and the work that she does as a business woman following her real vocation is also real work.
That's very cool.
(no subject)
Date: 2022-01-25 04:43 am (UTC)