With their vast spaces and constant sense of movement, train stations are naturally cinematic settings, something Egyptian director Youssef Chahine takes expert advantage of in Cairo Station. In its camerawork—from striking, wide-angle establishing shots to inserts of wheels in motion to the way the camera itself slides parallel to passing trains or down their aisles—Cairo Station’s visual virtuosity recalls another 1958 film that takes place in a transitory setting: Orson Welles’ border-town crime story, Touch of Evil. There’s a lurid nature to Cairo Station that also recalls Welles’ thriller. What begins as a sympathetic, almost neorealist portrayal of a mentally and physically challenged newspaper peddler named Qinawi (played by Chahine) eventually warps its way into a slasher film, complete with sex-as-death overtones. A leering, sexually frustrated loner who papers the walls of his shack with pinup advertisements, Qinawi’s obsession with a vivacious, flirtatious drink seller named Hannuma (Hind Rostom) becomes increasingly dangerous, especially when she teasingly agrees to marry him. One character says Hannuma has nine lives, like a cat, and that’s how Rostom plays her—fearlessly. In a scene that had to influence Anita Ekberg’s famous fountain frolic in La Dolce Vita, Hannuma dances around in a train car after getting sprayed with water, both the camera and Qinawi greedily watching her. How much sympathy are we supposed to have for Qinawi? Madbouli (Hassan el Baroudi), his employer, certainly cares for him, even defending him from the insults and abuse almost everyone else at the station heaps upon him (a sympathetic violin also accompanies such scenes). But then there are those close-ups of Qinawi’s lecherous eyes alternating with shots of women’s feet, not to mention the grisly details of his eventual outburst. How responsible for his actions is Qinawi? Is he an evil actor or a victim of society? Are we watching the makings of a midcentury Joker? Cairo Station never quite settles on an answer, which makes it all the more unsettling.
(8/8/2023)
