One of the most delightful quirks of classical cinema is how much films used to appreciate the movies themselves. Movie-love pervades many of the greatest classical Hollywood films from Sherlock Junior or Movie Crazy to the many different iterations of A Star is Born to Singing in the Rain – one of the purest joys for cinephiles keen on diving into cinema’s past is getting to appreciate just how much people used to love movies. Movies were everywhere, movies meant everything, and movies made life worth living. It might’ve been a keen bit of self-promotion on the studio’s part, but it’s also, for film freaks, highly relatable and, with the shrinking of our image culture, simply not the same anymore.
Classical Egyptian film Afreet Merati is a movie precisely about that feeling of getting lost in the fantasies of the silver screen. Of wishing, wanting to be, and thinking you are part of those fantasies that everyday entice millions of people to sit in a dark crowded room for two hours and gaze in awe. Aida (Shadia) is a bored housewife despondent from the lack of attention given her by her pencil-pushing bank manager husband, Salah (Salah Zulfiqar, Shadia’s real life husband). Listless and stuck at home day after day, she seeks solace in one of the few outlets afforded her: the cinema. The only quirk is that when Aida goes to the movies, she doesn’t just watch the film, she becomes the film, and for the rest of the night she wanders around the apartment in a semi-conscious state, acting out the main drama of whatever film she’s seen.
For a boring middle-manager like Salah this is an intolerable embarrassment. How can he have his wife tying up his sister to recreate a murder scene from a noir film? Or, even worse, come home in the middle of a dinner with the bank’s executives dressed like Irma La Douce and singing about her powers of seduction while dancing on their laps? After failing to solve the problem by first trying to cut her off (she became suicidal) and then trying to actually pay attention to her (impossible on his work schedule), he lands on the only viable solution: pretend to be a notorious underworld figure being pulled back into a life of crime and make real life exciting enough to lure her away from the world of cinematic fantasy. It’s batty, improbable, filled with corny jokes, and the type of thing you’d only find in a dumb movie i.e. it’s the perfect plan.
Fatin Abdel Wahab shoots all of this with a functional sense of film grammar that feels comfortable and skillful, if never breathtaking or impressive, but who needs dynamic compositions when you’ve got stars like Shadia? One of the most iconic actresses of Egyptian and Arab cinema, Shadia is captivating to watch and possesses one of the most alluring attributes of stardom: the ability to remain glamorous and otherworldly while simultaneously coming across as ordinary and relatable. Running the gamut from Garbo-esque ethereality to domestic screwball mugging ala Lucille Ball or Shirley McClaine, Shadia hypnotizes you at every turn, twisting herself from one campy scenario to another while still retaining the core kernel of romantic longing that makes the character pop in the first place. In the end it’s film as much about finding yourself in love with the many shades of Shadia as it is about the joys of cinema itself.
Thanks to the Red Sea Film Festival Afreet Merati has recently been restored and was present this year at the 3rd edition of the festival as part of their Red Sea: Treasures section. Seeing this film in a crowded theater with an audience discovering it for the first time, laughing at all of the jokes, and being wooed by the film’s seductive portrait of cinema was an experience that, like the film itself, reminds you why you love cinema in the first place.
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