Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The Yacoubian Building

Egypt

Very impressive film. Beautifully shot and edited, it was a contemporary melodrama written around a building opened in a tony neighborhood in Cairo in 1937. The building had undergone changes, of course. Somewhat faded, it now housed a variety of folks at all ends of the economic scale. We follow a half dozen of their lives which, in total, sum up the changes, tensions and major movements in Egypt today.

A great cast kept this out of the soap swamp. The novel from which this was taken undoubtedly held richer detail about these people but there was enough here to get us to care about their fate. The film dealt with topics like homosexuality and political corruption that made it a pariah in Egypt.

Solid, legitimate work of world cinema.

7

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