There’s hope yet for women struggling with shamefully inappropriate physical urges. Thankfully, caring friends and family members who have managed to retain their self control and middle-class family values are bound to intervene, set them straight, and encourage the triumph of propriety over salacious itches.
This appears to be the flimsy thesis of producer Hany-Girgis Fawzy’s hackneyed directorial effort "Ahasees" (Feelings)–clearly produced to capitalize on the recent growing appetite for sensationalist movies skirting the edge of obscenity, marketed as boldly transgressive to mask the shallowness of their content.
Salma, played by the hammy Ola Ghanem, is the main protagonist and one of the few (relatively) morally upright women encountered in the film. Trapped in the sham of a happy marriage, complete with a providing husband and kids who plant kisses on her cheeks when sufficiently poked, she can’t get over her former lover, Ihab.
Salma’s husband is played by the ubiquitous Edward, whose beefcake torso and gym clothes understandably make him irresistible to hot, loose women. His own infidelity, however, doesn’t seem to be as big a deal as Salma’s secret longings. Ihab, by contrast, is a stately prince of a gentleman, played by Bassem Samra in a performance as stiff as the Queen’s upper lip. He’s glorified throughout the movie and martyred at the end of it.
Salma’s best friend is also married but well-adjusted to her lewdness, meeting with her lover regularly until she eventually gets caught in the act and redeems herself by–you guessed it–donning the veil and reconnecting with her prayer mat. Randa el-Beheiri, whose raw alent has yet to be really tested, plays the wife of Ihab’s best friend. He’s addicted to "dirty girls," but the exact nature of the nastiness in which he partakes is never stated explicitly, allowing the darker side of the audience’s imagination to roam into the murkiest territory possible.
These characters and their storylines aren’t fleshed out with any convincing detail since the script simply never got to that stage of development. We are, however, privy to the characters’ completely pointless internal monologues, as if to show some hidden layer of depth beyond the paint-by-numbers acting.
The film scrutinizes Salma’s torment ad nauseam in a protracted effort by Ghanem to turn it into her star vehicle. She challenges her acting chops with statuesque weeping and, in the climactic scene where her lover dies in hospital, the hysterical flailing of a possessed banshee.
When Salam finally tires of badgering her friends, she visits a psychiatrist who serves as the film’s dismal moral compass. With the aid of a pointless clipboard she never refers to, the shrink automatically spells out the appropriate response to Salma’s predicament–to focus on the generous side of her unfaithful husband–her face locked by Botox in an expression of grave commiseration. This fountain of homegrown wisdom also advises El-Beheiri’s character to address her husband’s compulsive prurient interests by "being a woman in bed."
The emotional suffering of women is however probably too high-brow a concern for the producers of such movies, so they gladly resign themselves to the other task at hand–sexual arousal. Every sex scene, characterized by heavy petting and panting but spinelessly shying away from convincing intimacy, is followed by a gratuitous shower scene of no import whatsoever. Here the camera typically creeps up the female bather’s legs with the grace of a drooling voyeur, blazing a trail that only just reaches middle ground between censor appeasement and brazen lewdness.
And if you missed them in the shower, you’ll run into them bikini-clad by the pool. Ever considerate of his audience’s needs, the director also employs well-positioned extras to fill the screen’s dead spots with more glistening flesh. It would also be remiss not to include the obligatory belly-dancing-in-a-seedy-casino scene, with a sassy danseuse gyrating her burly hips for the entire length of the film’s kitschy title song.
The tight shots that frame the locales and their occupants are as glossy as a Lebanese music video. The carefully manicured visuals are punctuated by jarring black-and-white still photography montage sequences designed to drive scenes to their hyper-emotional breaking point. As Ghanem histrionically contemplates jumping off a bridge (you’ll wish she did), or wallows in her state of victimization when she receives a thrashing from her husband, you’ll get to see all this repeatedly from an array of angles, and then again in monochrome. If your jaw drops to guffaw, don’t hold it back–these ludicrously overdone scenes, you’ll soon discover, serve as much needed comic relief.
The film will likely find most of its audience among the throngs of shabab whose night out calls for a hefty dose of titillating trash. But even those poor sex-starved souls with little else to do will have their patience tested by this flick’s ending, and be left wishing they just pirated the steamy scenes off of the internet.
Ihab’s "surprise" battle with cancer–a final plea that this movie might actually be about something other than syrupy tears and raging hormones–cracks the maudlin barrier and will test your pain threshold. As the sequence progresses, the overall effect is like being bludgeoned with a blunt hatchet into a near coma.
The filmmakers probably pride themselves on their daring. In their mind they’ve tackled the taboo subject of misguided physical urges with gravity, and prescribed a fail-safe remedy to manage such feelings in a repressive and conservative society. But when all the half-cocked, misled rave reviews are long forgotten, the film’s true function as second-rate soft porn will undoubtedly emerge.
