Reflecting on Egypt’s Youssef Chahine: Film Review of “Bab el Hadid”

The movie “Bab el Hadid” brings back memories of the notorious Grand Central station in New York City, where I grew up. It captures the commotion and emotion of the train station as a hub: a place where people reunite after years apart; where people say goodbye to their loved ones; where people are always in a rush to get to the next destination. The Cairo station, like all train stations, is inherently not a destination but simply a part of the journey. However, in “Bab el Hadid,” which focuses on the station’s daily functioning, the place is redefined as a destination of its own with a community of its own.

This raw vision of the train station provides a nuanced commentary on class struggles because it exposes the station for what it is: a place for homeless people to take shelter, for the crazy to roam around, and for the lower class to make a spare buck by selling newspapers and fresh drinks. Throw in a street performer and lost tourists, and you have Grand Central. But this was not Grand Central — this was the 1958 Cairo station at the brink of an era of underclass mobilization and women’s emancipation. In its realism, the movie unravelled the themes of women’s rights activism, sexualization of women in the workplace, and unionization of laborers. The film’s honest and brutal commentary on these themes made it by far and away more real and relevant than many other Arab movies of that era. While it maintained the theme of a tragic love story that could never come to be due to class differences (i.e. Kenawi’s love for Hanuma), the context surrounding this plot is so much more nuanced that one could hardly call it a love story. Moreover, the extravagant decor of Egyptian films in the early 1900s was long forgotten in the production of this film, where the most commonly featured house decor was lewd magazine clippings of women pasted on the walls.

The portrayal of Kenawi’s fixation on women provided insight into the truth of sexualization of women: in many cases, it is incredibly creepy. By featuring an insane man in this role, the film was more sympathetic to women in instances of catcalling and stalking. It exposed the ugly truth that women are frequently physically threatened simply for the act of rejecting a man. After the idealized films from the earlier era, the honesty in this film was welcome, familiar, and, in a way, homey to me. The portrayal of a woman like Hanuma, who was sexy and desirable, in a tough and rude connotation was also a welcome reality and break from the “femme fatale” prototype in previous films, at least in the beginning of the film. However, her attitude and disregard for Abu Serih’s instructions along with his violent reaction brought back the power imbalance between men and women. Hanuma’s seductive response was even worse and regressed her character back to the “femme fatale” prototype, disappointing the earlier characterization of Hanuma as a new kind of woman.

The theme of insanity with Kenawi matched his disconnect with the hub of the train station. He talked about moving to his village, away from the noise and the people and the confusion, when he proposed to Hanuma. He was an outsider from the get go, not belonging in the train station community nor in the train station itself. Despite his violence and creepy behavior towards women, I could not help but feel for Kenawi in the moment when Madbouli talks to him at the end of the film because we saw that his desires were quite simple, like anybody else’s, after all. This film succeeded at making unlikely characters relatable and telling the stories of those whom society would never have considered or accepted before.

- Celeste Abourjeili