As I perused the internet for additional information about Youssef Chahine’s Cairo Station (1958) I was surprised by what I found. While I didn’t scour the farthest reaches of the web to find them, I did not, in a preliminary search, come across a single negative review of the film. Nearly every write-up I found hailed the movie as an “underappreciated masterpiece.” While I don’t deny the authors of these reviews their right to that opinion, I have to believe that I can’t be the only person who didn’t get much out of Chahine’s film. Part Hitchcockian thriller and part Rossellini-esque realism, this picture gets lost in the cavernous area between those two styles.
The setup for Cairo Station is rife with possibilities, as hubs of transport offer almost endless dramatic combinations of characters and stories. Here, in the main rail terminal in Cairo, there are scores of porters, passengers, police, and peddlers. Some are passing through and some make their living providing goods and services for those in transit. The crippled Qinawi (Chahine) sells newspapers and pines for the beautiful Hanuma, who jumps between trains selling cold drinks, all the while evading the station cops who want to put her out of business. She flirts with Qinawi, but is engaged to marry Abu Sri', a respected porter who’s trying to unionize his fellow handlers. Though another character narrates the story, most of the action unfolds from Qinawi’s perspective. He’s convinced he can win Hanuma’s heart before her marriage, and though his efforts are sad to watch he does not evoke any real sympathy. Hanuma doesn’t spurn his affections because of his handicap or his modest circumstances. She simply loves another man. It’s difficult to tell if her interactions with Qinawi are based in pity or genuine friendship, but it is clear that she doesn’t intend to leave Abu Sri'. When this finally becomes obvious to Qinawi his thoughts turn to violence.
There is so much potential for story here that goes unexplored. The rumblings about the labor movement are absent from the film’s second half, replaced by a subplot about a serial killer that may or may not connect to the characters present at the station. This is never made clear and, as such, feels as unresolved as the workers’ tangent. There’s so little connection between the characters as well. They all seem to be present because they need to be for the story to advance, and rarely does a minor character seem defined by more than their job.
Cairo Station is, at times, beautiful to look at, but the onscreen compositions rarely rise above their mise en scène to have any meaning. From a narrative standpoint, subplots seem only to exist within the film as pretexts for characterization. Nothing ever really emerges from them. They come and go without resolution. At 76 minutes the film moves quickly despite itself. It barely has time to contain anything and thus dwells in simplicity. Roger Ebert says that “no good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.” Cairo Station seems to openly defy this principle. It is the rare film that I disliked because it needed to be longer, and to contain more…or perhaps (like Rock Hudson at 2001: A Space Odyssey) I just missed the elements that make it a masterpiece while I was searching for the elements that make it a film.
Language: Arabic
Runtime: 76 Minutes
Available from Netflix.com
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