30 Years Ago: Nicely packaged mediocrity

A long-lost relative, a demonic inheritance and nine exotic flowers disturb the peace of a rich Cairene family, triggering a fatal and greedy drive for vengeance in nine of its nasty members. That’s the premise of Men Talateen Sanna (30 Years Ago), which ranked second in cinemas this Eid holiday weekend with a rocketing LE10 million in revenue, behind Gaheem fel Hend (Hell in India), a comedy about an Egyptian special forces squad on a mission to rescue a diplomat kidnapped in India.

I decided to go and see 30 Years Ago because crime films are a rarity in local cinema — among the perpetual production of romantic comedies and dramas set in Egypt's unprivileged neighborhoods — but seem to be a growing genre in cinemas and on TV, now that politics-related productions are on their way out. Also, it has a remarkable number of stars involved — most of the cast are actors that could headline a movie alone, so the fact that they all agreed to co-star seemed to indicate a strong storyline and impressive production.

From romcoms to adventure flicks, director Amr Arafa's previous productions — such as Africano (2001), Ibn al-Qonsol (The Councilor's Son, 2010), Zaheimar (Alzheimers, 2010) and Samir Aboul Nile (2013) — were largely successful, and here he does skillfully orchestrate a flock of characters and cautiously balances the various ingredients of a commercially successful movie.

At the big, old family mansion in a Cairo suburb, handsome Omar (Sherif Mounir, alternating between constant jolliness and sudden melancholy) makes an extravagant entrance with his ostentatious flowers after 15 years away in England. Over dinner that night, however, his relatives’ welcoming masks start to fall, showing various types of dark malice. Like Santa on Christmas Eve, Omar has reemerged with money, lots of it, but his fortune is tainted with a curse that’s made him sterile. In search of familial love and stability, he distributes his wealth equally among aunts, uncles and cousins. But, as he frees himself from evil, his family members are cursed one by one.

Nabila (Ragaa al-Geddawi), the eldest aunt, has Alzheimer's disease and Nagwa (Mervat Amin) is a sleazy older woman with an eye for young men and a drug-addict son (Nabil Eissa). Hassan (Salah Abdallah) is a gluttonous old man whose daughter Noha (a bland Gamila Awad) has married a man 20 years her senior for money, and whose crazed, pill-popping wreck of a son Selim (Mohamed Mahran, who gives the film’s only memorable acting performance painfully recalling his ex-wife's infidelity) steals his best friend's fiancée. Finally there’s elderly businessman Gamal (Ahmed Foud Selim) and his daughter Rasha (a lukewarm turn by Lebanese actress Nour), a snobby and beautiful opportunist.

Rather improbably, they all die in one dubious accident after the other, until just Omar and his struggling-writer cousin Emad (the narrator, heartthrob Ahmed al-Saqqa) remain alive, battling for the heart of Hanan (Mona Zaki) a working-class, chatty and not especially talented starving poet from Alexandria, who resides in the same shabby downtown hotel as Emad.

Saqqa, who’s known for his adrenaline-driven action roles in films such as Arafa’s Africano and the Al-Gezirah (The Island) franchise, puts on an overly dramatic persona for Emad — somberly withdrawn yet tasteless, with an irritating grimace. Zaki's Hanan is funny at times, but she overdoes the tackiness, and her character already feels contrived because her only role in the plot is to be what the two protagonists fight over in the movie’s last half hour.

Scenarist Ayman Bahgat Amar (who also wrote Arafa’s The Councilor’s Son and Samir Aboul Nile, as well as 2011’s fat suit romcom X-Large) draws his many characters flamboyantly yet superficially. They are greedy, vain, disturbed, rude, evil, vindictive or opportunistic, but that’s it. Fortunately, there are so many of them that the spectator can just about overlook this flatness, and it’s compensated for with some flashy décor by Mohamed Amin, impressive costumes and a new, oddly romantic song titled Al-Lokah (The Rendezvous) by Mohamed Hamaki that plays suddenly when Emad's heart is broken.

But while the storyline had potential, in that it explores a new, up-and-coming genre, somewhere midway everything falls apart. Even though the mystery of the curse unfolds relatively plausibly near the end, I left with a niggling disappointment. This was partly due to the movie's poor montage by editor Moataz al-Kateb, with some scenes ending abruptly and no effort to create a convincing sense of time — we can’t figure out how long it takes for the family to die one by one, for example, and at one point Emad leaves for London but it’s impossible to work out how long for. Worse than the editing though is the limiting and scattered screenplay, which does not give room for the actors to elaborate. Fatally for a character-driven film, all those promising celebrity-filled roles end up boxed in tiny slots.