AFF Update VI - Kiss Me Not On The Eyes (Egypt)

Ahlaam rendered Zach and I completely speechless. We stood outside trying to smoke and say something intelligent about the film. I was busy writing it up in my head and noticing that the line for Kiss Me Not On The Eyes was growing steadily longer and longer. We crushed out our smokes and hopped into the suddenly moving line as they were letting people inside. I think we were both ready for something different, something other than what we had seen as it had filled our senses with a pain and sorrow that wasn't easy to forget or put down. In the sense of the ecstatic theatre, the theatre of Dionysus, that would reach across the stage in its dythyrambic form through the satyr chorus and bring the audience and action of the play into cohesive pathos, well it succeeded, so much so that we forgot how to speak.



Kiss Me Not On The Eyes

The title of the film comes from a piece of Egyptian music that is sung and played during the film. The story is relatively simple and even predictable at times. A young girl, daughter of a famous belly dancer, is chasing her mother's ghost as she studies the dance. She is courted by a young man who she has affection for, but isn't quite sure she's in love with him. Love becomes equated with loss in the sense of posession and the fear of loosing him forces her hand, she agrees to marry. Not surprisingly, once married, her artistry, her dance, becomes a point of contention between her and her new husband who wants to keep her body to himself. She calls herself an artist, he sees her as his wife, the controlling hand of the patriarchal society creates the tension, the necessary tension, to allow Dunia, our dancer and protagonist, the courage to blaze her own trail.

Now that's the core of the story, but its the supporting cast that really set the film apart. Take for instance her friend, a woman and a cab driver who runs what must be the only American Graffitti styled cab in all of Cairo. Then there's the woman who runs the Guest House where the famous poet lives who struggles against the censors to keep 1001 Arabian Nights from being censored. Egypt is a wonderfully complex place, as far as its cinema portrays it. It is a secular goverment that seems to allow its female citizenry more freedome than seen in previous films. Here they run businesses, teach at the university, live what seems more fulfilling lives. Yet, in all of this, a dark spectre stalks the story and characters: excision, or female circumcision. It is estimated that 97% of all Egyptian women are genitally mutilated at a young age. Prescription holds that a young girl is to be excised when she begins to menstruate and this will help her lead a happier and more fulfilling life. The tension and horrific act is at the heart of one of the sub plots of Yasmine, a young girl, with a very old fashioned grandmother that insists on this happening. A woman arrives in a black cloak and the procedure is done at home with nothing more than a razor blade. Its a difficult seen to watch, and on which Dunia finds herself arriving too late to save young Yasmine's body and future happiness: "congratulations" she says to the grandmother, "instead of protecting her, you've made her just like you, her kitchen will forever be cold and not all the spices of the world will bring her cooking to life." This same grandmother had been trying to convince Dunia to have an excision, and that she, the grandmother, had found a doctor who would only cut out a fraction, instead of the whole thing. This part of the world is terribly difficult to understand in a society that seems so forward thinking and alive with art and artistry that may not necessarily be in accordance with sharia.

The old poet/professor plays a significant role in the film. He becomes Dunia's teacher and speaks with her about Arabic love poetry. There is a central problem that seems to be addresses, but that passion, a kind of rapture and suffering because of love is freely written about in lyric and song, but as for passion and love itself, as the poet puts it "we're afraid of it opennly." This poetic tension, as in, aftermath vs. actuality, or real presence vs. assumed pitfall, is almost a modern analogy for the preventions/prescriptions of religious law in attempting to preserve morality, and the ability to live life undaunted according to a universal law of live and let live, and that it may not be a fall from grace, but a more fulfilling way to live. Dunia is hell bent on living as she wants to live. There is a powerfull seen when she says to the committee, as she trys out for a dance competition, I've never seen my body. She sits with her knees pulled to her chin, her toes wrapped in the hem of her skirt, this is her fetal pose where she is safe. As she discovers more and more poetry, listening to the now blind professor, the victim of an attacker wishing to defend Islam and its opponents who would have Egyptian society revel in the immorality of the Arabian nights, Dunia decides to look at her body. She buys a mirror and hangs it near her bed. She undresses out of the shot and then returns to the round mirror wrapped in the bubblewrap that the mirror came in, still modest, but only in so far as the bubble wrapping is the appearance of modesty, and beneath it is a flame that can consume us all as the audience. She peers, she looks, openning the cellular curtain that surrounds her.

Mamhoud, Dunia's husband, becomes more and more strict with her, asking her to put her hair up when she goes out and asking her not to dance anymore. Eventually, as you might've guessed, following Yasmine's excission, a fight with Mamhoud, she flees her own apartment where he is now living, taking Yasmine with her, and winds up in the guest house where the old Professor lives. There she discovers sensuality, a kind of freedom, she dresses in the garb of his lover, the woman who runs the hotel, and enters his room, shaking the man bracelets on her left arm as a kind of familiar notification, because that's what she witnessed one night when they were making love. She steps into the role, breaking all tradition, marital vows, everything, to discover, or more accurately, pursue something taboo, something that sets her blood on fire. Her dance teacher says that there is an equilibrium of the universe when you dance and that equilibrium is present through all the axes of the body from north to south, east to west front and back. It is only then, when she enters the room in garb, and the professor tells her "never dress as another, never disguise yourself, never wear another's makeup" that this seems to become a reality. The axes have realligned themselves because she has begun to live her life according to her own rules, even if she stumbles a bit in a dress that's too long for her.

Its a mesmerizing film. The actress that plays Dunia eats up the screen, as she stamps her foot and turns her body into a liquid interlocuter between heaven and Earth in a sufi like twirl with one arm raised to the heavens and one to the ground. She is a conduit for the narrative and also for tradition and modernity. The gestures of the raised hand and the lowered hand are not unlike the famous Raphael fresco of "The School of Athens" where Plato's finger (the model was Leonardo) is raised to the heaven's in his quest for The Republic, the logos, and Aristotle's hand is outstretched inferring Earth, the land, topos, (Michelangelo was the model for Aristotle), in a dichotomy of representation and ideation, bot present, both important, the polemics defining the spectrum and harmonizing it.


detail from The School of Athens by Raphael, c. 1509