The inciting incident is the news that the already overstretched farmers will have the water supply for their crops halved — a move that will destroy their livelihoods and their community. Placing their trust in the wrong people to help them, the community finds themselves under further threat from corruption and urbanisation.
Chahine is able to inspire, by showing the villagers standing side by side, but also admits that political oppression will not always unite the dispossessed. Chahine affords these rural citizens the full focus and dignity of humanity. Filmed at the eponymous rail depot, it finds Chahine adopting a gritty, street-level style inspired by Italian neorealism, yet morphing genres from searing social commentary to Hitchcockian thrills.
Chahine himself plays a disabled newspaper seller in a station filled with porters, drink sellers and beggars who are largely ignored by the sharp-suited middle classes. Cairo Station layers in themes such as post-colonial corruption and the importance of unions, but perhaps most radically for the time it also has an entirely non-judgmental view on pre-marital sex. That progressive outlook led to the film being banned in Egypt for more than a decade, even though the act itself takes place entirely off screen.
The year is and the whole place is bedlam. World War II is raging in the desert and drunken British and Australian troops are brawling with locals in the lobby.
The screen is barely visible through a cloud of cigarette smoke. The boys head up to the balcony and take their seats.
The lights dim; the film comes on. The young protagonist Yehia Mohsen Mohiedine gazes in rapt adoration. A suave and sophisticated Frenchman is walking up and down a glass staircase, flanked by giant candelabra and chorines clad in sequins and ostrich plumes. He sings of how he plans to build a stairway all the way up to paradise. The stairs, as he walks on them, flash on and off with lights of different colours.
To a casual student of movies, this comes across as a monumental howler. That musical number is from the Vincente Minnelli classic An American in Paris a film made nearly a decade after the events of Alexandria…Why? I put "inferior" in quotation marks because, although this is not as strong as the director's previous legendary pieces of cinema, this is still a pretty bold picture.
Some of the juxtapositions caused by editing or sound design were jarringly dissonant; well-played, Mr. The story interweaves the lives of many characters, chief among them Yehia Mustafa, a teen-aged student and movie lover and stand-in for Chahine who nurses his first stirrings of creativity as an actor and director in local theatrical productions. An ambitious portrait of a city and time frozen in amber. The sprawling scrapbook narrative present here- although compelling- ends up not fully succeeding.
All of the different plot threads are interesting separately I would watch a movie devoted to either of the two forbidden love couples on their own but they don't flow together and the film as whole ends up feeling overstuffed and undercooked simultaneously. Structural qualms aside, this is a unique and riveting watch and a fine showcase of Youssef Chahine's talent.
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Where to watch. Alexandria… Why? Director Youssef Chahine.
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