Days before the advent of Ramadan, I was intrigued by the title of actress Amina Khalil’s upcoming television series, The Seventh Itch — a very strange-sounding term in Arabic — which refers, as it turns out, to The Seven Year Itch.
Written by participants in screenwriter Mariam Naoum’s Sard Workshop and directed by Karim Al-Shennawi, the 15-episode show stars Khalil and Mohamed Shahine as Nadine and Adam as the main couple — both give startling performances — as well as featuring Asmaa Galal and Aly Kassem as a younger couple disputing whether or not to have children. It also features an ageing couple (Nadine’s parents) and a widow (Adam’s mother, played by Hanan Soliman) who falls in love and marries in her sixties. The script is well written and does a good job of balancing the many stories it deals with, but it is restricted to a thin segment of society: the upper middle class. The series features remarkable music by, among others, the band Masar Igbari and the pop singer Samar Tarek.
Played by Aida Riyad and Mohamed Mahmoud, respectively, Nadine’s parents are a housewife and a civil servant who have nothing in common. As a result she rushes into marrying her high school sweetheart, an ambitious engineer, and gives up having a career once she they have twin babies. When an opportunity for employment as a dubbing artist comes up, Adam won’t let her take it — and that is the straw that breaks the camel’s back after years of misunderstanding and daily clashes. Despite excellent acting the series starts to be boring after the seventh episode. The couple are constantly fighting, Nadine yells and screams, but dramatically nothing is going on.
A master scene takes place in the ninth episode, entitled “If”, when a civilised and emotional confrontation occurs between Nadine and Adam in their elegant kitchen, with gloomy lighting and a greyish background. The dialogue is coherent and well thought out: each of the two expresses their feelings and describes their thwarted expectations. But the peaceful conversation ends with divorce, an unexpected plot twist. But considering how they had been best friends for 21 years, this development is not convincing. Conflict over a wife’s professional life is a cliche that may have been relevant when the landmark film Merati Mudir ‘Am (My Wife Is a General Manager), starring Shadia and Salah Zulfiqar, came out in 1966. Both their long history together and their background would exclude the possibility of this being a problem.
The first seven episodes unfold in chronological order, with each marking a special occasion such as Christmas, Mother’s Day, or the start of the Corona epidemic lockdown. This makes the action more relatable. Like much of Naoum’s work, positive values were highlighted in the course of various episodes, the most important of which is that men should be able to weep openly, which is relatively new in Egyptian drama. After the divorce, Adam goes into a state of depression and cannot stop weeping, even in the street. A similar thing happens to Sherif when his estranged 16-year-old daughter — the result of a short-lived relationship with a foreigner — wants to meet him. Another positive value new to Egyptian public discourse is the importance of therapy, which Salma and Sherif resort to in order to overcome the trust issues resulting from the sudden appearance of Sherif’s daughter Julia (Roya Hashimi), whom Salma has not known about.
In the 11th episode, Nadine, Salma and the older women debate the meaning of the seventh itch and whether it is true. The agree that people change in three-year cycles, and explain marital conflict by the idea that, over two cycles, the partners will have changed in incompatible ways.
Women expressed great enthusiasm for The Seventh Itch on social media, generating a debate about married women’s careers and giving the magazine What Women Want much to talk about. My own reservation is that the series is too direct and preachy to be a real drama, which would require more creativity and less consumerist wisdom. In her attempt to start a career after her divorce, Nadine starts a YouTube podcast in which she interviews her own family and friends, asking only one question: what is the main reason behind breakups? The routine answers and generic instructions are boring and prescriptive, which is not to say that young viewers cannot benefit from them.
Luckily, in the last episode, “The End of a Beginning”, Adam attempts to get back together with Nadine who, despite her obvious love for him, does not make a decision before the series ends. Sard’s last piece of advice is that you mustn’t go back to a marriage while your “healing journey” is still progressing after only a few months of divorce.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 April, 2023 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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