Lucky enough to attend the Dubai International Film Festival for the second time, my interest was, once again, in the Arab films. I saw mostly shorts, and most of them were great: creative writing, intense acting, a range of production values, a nice diversity overall. But among the features, I noticed a new variety of films, one with a common theme: the protagonist who left to the West years ago has now come back. Using a fish-out-of-water format there is a culture clash played out by an incessant interpolation whereby the protagonist is confused and frustrated by [their own] local culture. In the post-colonial flavour, what we are left with is a premise of “man against [his own] othered society”.
This plays out in Microphone from Alexandria, a great film showcasing the immense underground musical and visual talent in the city. Here, perhaps this ‘new to town’ approach is used as a vehicle to really draw out the difficulty that the main character goes through as a producer attempting to get these artists a gig. By allowing the audience to follow the protagonist through his maze of bureaucracy, the movie illustrates the information and culture control in Egypt, a form of censorship that should be broken away from in order to celebrate the arts and promote individual expression.
But the premise I speak of is more clearly played out in Transit Cities, a Jordanian film about a woman who comes back from the US to Amman while going through divorce (what seems to be a cultural faux pas). In Amman, she is aggravated by the religion, she is annoyed by the globalization and disturbed by the smugness on one-side and the passivity on the other. Director of the film, Mohammed Hushki, wanted to highlight the setting of Amman as a place that is merely transit for many different people, in particular the Jordanians who have left only to come back bringing with them the idea that they are, at anytime, ready to leave again.
Hushki mentions in
an article in the Jordan Times that the film is meant to show how polarized the city of Amman has become. A pious and conservative half is on one side and a globalized, Western thinking “neurosis” on the other. This premise of the film is based on this clash amidst the Ammani community and is played out through one main protagonist, Laila. She is annoyed by either side, and does not seem interested to fit in to any of it.
Laila, the character through whom we follow these ideas adds a certain layer of discomfort to the picture. Her representation of the independent liberal woman is by way of her painfully tight jeans, messy hair, cleavage popping, smoking-on- the-streets (indeed yet another cultural faux pas), and hanging out with a stereotype intellectual married ex-boyfriend while he lies to his wife about it (despite the mocking of Laila’s liberal-morale). By this point, it is the representation of the theme and the confused outlook it presents that are somewhat uneasy.
Unfortunately, however, besides this cliché and weak representation, there is some truth to it, she actually does represent a good deal of people. This film attempting to illustrate the two poles by placing a [supposedly] liberated, independent woman in the middle is uneasy because we see so much of this. There is a popular misleading and somewhat naïve expectation of what ‘development’, both social and societal should be. Based on the ideas that Hushki is presenting regarding his illustrations of the two poles, couldn’t we say that it is somewhat fantastical to believe that a changing city will be so harmonious? And looking at Laila’s reaction to the piousness of her sister and mother, isn’t it a bit narrow minded to think that those who have changed alongside the changing city are inferior? Again, unfortunately, many people do; this kind of postcolonial judgement is everywhere. Acting as a lens through which the hometown (Amman in this case) is portrayed as backwards and fanatic adds to this existing attitude. As an Arab who has gone back and forth between my ‘homeland’ and the West, I identify with that person on the screen from when I was a young teenager. At that age, I didn’t recognize the line between teenage angst and judgment of the nuances of a local cultural.
It is only at one final point during the climax where Laila’s family has a big blow-up on morality, that her sister puts her in her place. In response to her comment about going ‘back to the kitchen to cook for the kids’, her sister points out the misfortune of what her idea of being ‘cultured and liberated’ is. While she’s out being her ‘free’ self, it is her veiled, married sister who is making payments for the house that their parents live in and all else.
The film almost entirely seemed to showcase stereotypical characters that were the thorn in our protagonist’s freethinking side. She being the active female character amongst both, other passive females and even more passive males, puts her in a more daring situation, packaging her as superior to the rest, perhaps for not fitting into the two categories of Ammani society that have been presented to us: she is presented as an independent thinker that doesn’t fall into the pigeonholes that everyone else does.
So in the end I was a bit lost. While I appreciate that the filmmaker has identified a general issue that is blazing across the entire Middle East, that conflict between ‘religious dogma’ and the ‘globalized’ towards the grave point of neoliberal, the portrayal of it was skewed in its drawing the main character as a just-back-from-the-West woman with issues as the person through whose eyes we are meant to be questioning local society. The interpolation here is palpable, and although it is a story by a native of the society we are watching the film about, this society is portrayed as more of an ‘other’ society as any foreign film would. I could understand Laila’s frustrations, but I thought the portrayal and form of question was immature and disrespectful of local traits and contexts. The only voice we actually hear, again, the only eyes through which we as audiences see, is that of this "empowered" Westernized woman, which in turn completely diminishes any 'local' voice the film could have presented. Unlike the Microphone case, the ‘vehicle’ here was lost to a scoffy attitude that was ultimately judgmental and adolescent in it self.
