Can a great filmmaker make a film that doesn’t shine, and this after a long absence? This is the question we ask ourselves watching the latest film by Daoud Abdel-Sayed, Qudrat Ghayr Adiya (Out of the Ordinary).
Generally speaking, the great directors reveal themselves through their ability to tell stories according to their personal visions. It is their original choices that allow them to produce outstanding works. But sometimes even the best filmmakers make movies that are not up to par. Daoud Abdel-Sayed has been often hailed as a screenwriter and director. Yet his drama Qudrat Ghayr Adiya cannot parallel his previous films.
Almost a year after the film was released outside Egypt, and its premiere at the Dubai International Film Festival in December 2014, Qudrat Ghayr Adiya finally makes it to local cinema theatres.
The movie takes the viewer into the fetish world of its author where regular people tormented by their doubt search one another. This is definitely a film for adult viewers.
The protagonist of the movie, Yehya (played by renowned actor Khaled Aboul Naga) is a young doctor immersed in his thesis on paranormal phenomena. Faced by the scarcity of examples and challenges that the research brings along, the thesis supervisor advised him to take a break. Yehia decides to travel in search of people who are out of the ordinary.
He goes to a coastal village, not far from Alexandria, and settles in a small hotel. There he meets an opera singer (played by Hassan Kami, an artist who himself has had a unique career as Egyptian tenor). Yehia also encounters a religious chanter (portrayed by Mahmoud el Gindy), a painter and arts professor (Ahmad Kamal) and an Italian documentary filmmaker (Akram El Sharkawy).
There is also a young and attractive divorcee Hayat (Naglaa Badr), with her young daughter Farida (Mariam Tamer) whose childish naivety and freshness conceal unusual powers which trigger Yehya’s curiosity and equally puzzle the neighbourhood.
The film provides a look deep into the souls of the characters torn by doubt, people who crave for a break from the social or personal limitations and hope to hover freely like the seagulls whose picture returns in several scenes of the film.
Just like in all other films by Daoud Abdel-Sayed, the characters are saturated souls trying to find themselves in the world. And just like in previous films, the scenario embodies yet another rat race, a typical Daoud’ian – should we put it this way – treadmill, a constant struggle between the government and the human, between fantasy and reality, doubt and certainty.
(Photo: still from Daoud Abdel Sayed's 'Qudrat Ghayr Adiya')
Make way for personal perceptions
It is through this attachment to the personal perceptions rather than his status as a great director, that Abdel-Sayed offers quite a repetitive, though deeply conceptual story, even if he ends up creating the most confusing scenario in all of his filmography.
He also resorts to many ideas already known from his previous productions.
Abdel-Sayed had already named Yehya the protagonists of other films he wrote and directed, such as Ard el-Khof (The Land of Fear, 1999) and Rassayel el-Bahr (Messages from the Sea, 2010), first starring late actor Ahmed Zaki, latter Asser Yassin.
What links the three characters together – be them Yehya (Ahmed Zaki) from Ard al-Khof, Yehya (Asser Yassin) from Rassayel el-Bahr and now Yehya (Khaled Abol Naga) in Qudrat Ghayr Adiya – is the director’s search for a common truth.
Even the character of Hayat (Naglaa Badr) echoes yet another Abdel Sayed’s prototype. Enough to recall Hayat, an attractive woman, entangled within her complicated social condition, played by Hend Sabry in a 2001 drama, Mowaten we Mokhber we Haramy (A Citizen, a Detective and a Thief), written and directed by Abdel Sayed.
Looking at Abdel Sayed’s filmography at large, the characters resemble one another and the change of the location is not enough to infuse the plot with freshness.
The hotel customers are either flat or over caricaturised, without dramatic justification. Even if each one of them defends his freedom of expression in his own way, they remain vaguely linked to the extraordinary capabilities that are at the heart of the story.
The scene presenting the circus is supposed to symbolise the chaos in our daily life. Here nothing is concealed, allowing the director to demonstrate the out of the ordinary -- or probably supernatural -- powers of the characters.
In the director’s reference to the relationship between a citizen and one in power, we see the donkey experiencing continuous fear of the lion, though the latter is locked in his cage.
Another far-fetched scene portrays the rejection of the religious fanatics and bearded people inside the circus.
(Photo: still from Daoud Abdel Sayed's 'Qudrat Ghayr Adiya')
Overly aestheticised visuals
Putting the implementation aside however, Qudrat Ghayr Adiya is a very special work in Daoud Abdel-Sayed’s filmography where visuals oscillate between the simplicity and ornamentation, yet sometimes becoming too artificial.
Throughout the whole movie, we are offered a succession of visuals which are probably overly retouched, with excessive colours on the verge of becoming garish.
The production designer Onsi Abu Seif and the cinematographer Marwan Saber, have certainly invested a lot of work into the film. The result however is the recurrent visual flatness and faults in the movie's layout.
On the other hand, a few visual effects prove to be too poor, an evident problem appearing in a number of scenes including one with the lion in the cage.
In their turn, except for Naglaa Badr – whose first cinema performance proves quite interesting – the cast does not take our breath away. Despite their renown, most of the actors fall into a trap of artificiality and clichés.
However, the whole production benefits from the haunting music composed by the director’s favorite composer Rageh Daoud.
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