Fools’ Alley Tawfik Saleh (Egypt, 1955)

The plot is constructed on a solid platform of lively Mahfouzian characters like the angry young man, the village beauty, the expressive mother, the stringent father, the village idiot and the wise man of religion. A group of average small-town people one can find anywhere in the world.

From the beginning, the movie gives the impression of actors being designated a role and asked to do nothing else but react to their surrounding. And everyone, though sometimes dramatically, does the job well. The storyline tries to portray the communal living and shared conscience that can be found in such societies. Nothing is private, everything is everybody’s business. On the positive side, it is like one big happy family. But the twist in the plot, which occurs exactly halfway through the movie, is an incident that occurs to one of the central characters - the madman. Even though he ekes out a living in the fringes of society, the unnatural incident (which involves a lot of money) pushes him into the centre of it all, and everybody starts being somebody else. The harmonious sensibility that existed previously turns to something malicious. A scene that immediately came to my mind was the classic Gods Must Be Crazy (1981) by Jamie Uys. A coke bottle falls from the sky and hits no one. But as a consequence, the peaceful forest tribe amidst which it falls turns violent attacking each other until an old lady gets hit by the bottle. And then sanity returns.

In an interview for ‘The Paris Review’ in 1992, Mahfouz says: “There are no heroes in most of my stories - only characters.” The handsome brooding Mr. Right is not the hero of the movie. But the star of the show is the madman. In modern societies, the crazies are left to fend for themselves out in the streets. In a village community, even though he is in the outskirts of society, the madman is still a part of it. The final scenes even question the ‘insanity’ of the madman. Nevertheless, the viewers leave the cinema with a smile.

By Ziad Abdul Samad