Azadeh Moaveni

Stunning. Long, but rather beautifully crafted and just as charming as the novel. The credit must go in part to Adel Imam, who plays the part of the dissolute, aging Pasha masterfully. Downtown Cairo is almost a characterful itself, and the aerial, loving shots of its faded, elegant streets and maidans are striking. I have only two reservations. First, the tacked-on, Halloween costume beards of the Islamic radicals were quite silly, and out of place in such an otherwise slick production. Next, why didn’t I notice properly in the novel what the problematic and disappointing characterization of Hatem Rashid, the gay editor of Le Caire, the city’s French newspaper?

It struck me only as I watched the story unfold on screen how Alaa Al-Aswany turns his story’s main gay character into a sad morality tale about homosexuality. We are told that Hatem becomes gay because his parents neglected him as a child, leaving him ‘for the servants to play with.’ He is molested or raped, it’s not quite clear which, by a member of the household staff, and this shapes his lifelong preference, the story goes, for men. Al-Aswany seeminly encourages our sympathy for Hatem, suggesting we should excuse his gayness because of his childhood trauma. Initially I thought it was quite ground-breaking for the novel to center around a gay character, given the taboo against homosexuality in mainstream Egytpian culture, but Hatem only plays on the worst stereotypes, rather than challenging them. How disappointing — a story, both the book and film, with such huge reach across the Arab world could have served up a very different message, but instead it recycled the narrow thinking that the rest of the story challenges.