Cairo Station
1958, directed by Youssef Chahine
Newsstand operator Madbouli draws a rather exaggerated picture of his workspace as he sets the scene for Cairo Station:
“This is Cairo Station, the heart of the capital. Every minute a train departs, and every minute another one arrives. Thousands of people meet, thousands of others bid farewell. People from north and south, natives and foreigners, the rich and the poor, people with jobs and people without them.”
First of all, most Cairenes would probably place the heart of their city in Tahrir Square. Also, in a station with four tracks and three passenger platforms, a departure and an arrival every minute would be incredible even at rush hour. Moreover, most travelers and commuters come and go privately, so that “thousands” of meetings or farewells sounds a bit high. This is no fault of the writing, however. In fact it’s important that Madbouli speaks in hyperbole. He’s a newsagent, and he’ll later instruct his wandering vendor Qinawi (played by director Youssef Chahine) to tout the dramatic headlines of a murder case to sell papers. Madbouli is a kindly old man, at least in his own telling, but he also peddles sensationalism. Cairo Station begins with Madbouli’s dramatic point of view, but it gradually works against the dramatic to arrive at a more honest view of life.
Madbouli continues his emphatic description, telling us how the station draws natives and foreigners, rich and poor, employed and unemployed, people from north and south. He’s undoubtedly right, but his use of opposites betrays a newsagent’s interest in the extremes of society. The Rashid murder case that dominates the day’s headlines is one of those extremes. An unknown killer had dismembered a woman’s body and stuffed it into a cargo trunk, where it was discovered headless and armless in the Rashid train station.
The film’s plot will reflect the news report, but the parallel is no coincidence. After hearing the news, Qinawi decides to stab Hannuma, an attractive soft drink vendor who rejected him, and stuff her into a wooden trunk. Qinawi’s crime needs no external inspiration, however. The point of the parallel crimes in Rashid and Cairo is to contrast the simplistic extremes of news reports against the messiness of reality. Instead of a mysterious unsolved act of evil committed by some hypothetical psychopath, we witness a bungled crime of passion committed by a social outcast with arrested development. The implication is that reality, when we look closely, tends to be more complex and less shocking than we typically imagine it.
Following his remarks on the train station, Madbouli tells us: “My job allows me to read about strange incidents, but what I see here is often even stranger. And the strangest thing of all happened one day after midday prayer.” Here he introduces Qinawi, whom he takes pity on and hires to sell papers. Again he sensationalizes. Surely there is nothing so strange about finding a destitute man in an urban railway station. He places the incident in the middle of the day, giving it symbolic importance, but the real strangeness will unfold across a later day, spanning the rest of the film, as inserted images of the station’s clocks tick the hours from 7:30 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Qinawi’s story will be the center of Cairo Station. It begins and ends the film, but it must compete with diverse subplots and side incidents. Abu Siri is trying to unionize his fellow porters against gangster-like boss Abu Qabr. Young women selling soft drinks without a license are constantly harassed by cart vendor Zakzouk and buffet owner Mansour, who keep trying to get them arrested. An anonymous girl has come to bid farewell to her secret lover, but she must hide from his upper-class family. Abu Siri plans to marry Hannuma (whom Qinawi longs for) the next day. A group of modern youths comes through dancing and playing music, arousing the scorn of Islamic fundamentalists. A congress of feminists arrives and talks to the press.
These miscellaneous threads serve two main purposes. First, the variety of humanity converging on a small area across a single day makes the train station a microcosm. It’s like a miniature of Cairo itself, or of Egypt, or of something even larger, so that the movie speaks to something universal.
Second, all the subplots and incidents coalesce around the two forces that drive Qinawi to his crime – economics and sex. Qinawi is the most economically disadvantaged character, living in an open shack and working for pennies. As if to mirror this, about half of the film’s incidents revolve around people’s struggles to survive. The porters are fighting to organize, and the soft drink vendors hustle for their living. Hannuma saves a paperboy from a close call with an oncoming train, an incident passed over so quickly that it drives home the routine hazards of being poor.
The remaining incidents stress the omnipresent division of the sexes in Egypt. The day opens with a man ogling a smartly dressed woman: “Wow! What a hot number!” The porters and a juice vendor harass the girl who’s come to meet her boyfriend. The soft drink vendors cater to lusty male passengers. A woman tightens her blouse around her breasts when men glance at her. An angry husband beats Qinawi for staring at his wife then throws a veil over her head. The victim in the Rashid murder case is a woman, and members of the Organization of Women Against Marriage speak out on women’s rights after applying rouge for their male audience.
In such a society Qinawi is a living contradiction. He’s the poorest of the poor, a man without physical or economic advantages, yet his culture places him above women. The paradox will ultimately drive him mad. His friendship with Hannuma makes him feel entitled to possess her, yet when she complains to her fiancé, Abu Siri blames her for provoking Qinawi. The preface introduces Qinawi as sexually frustrated. He posts sexy pictures all over his shed, and while listening to the report from Rashid he severs the head and arm from his latest cut-out, symbolically reenacting the crime before knifing his own victim. Five times Qinawi’s eyes are framed in extreme close-up, each time accompanying a look of possessive or violent intent toward a woman (or, in the fourth instance, a cat whom he mistakes for Hannuma in his delusion).
At the climax, when Qinawi has pinned Hannuma to the tracks with a knife to her head, Madbouli talks him out of hurting her. The movie doesn’t question the necessity of Madbouli’s words, but it’s significant that he once again stretches the truth, telling Qinawi he’s getting dressed for his wedding as men in white coats slip his arms into a straitjacket. All his life society has been lying to Qinawi, telling him that however low his place may be, he’s still superior to a woman. Without dehumanizing Qinawi or making a villain out of him, the movie works to erode that lie.
In the final shot, as Qinawi is taken away and Abu Siri carries Hannuma up the platform, the anonymous girl stands in the foreground under a light, staring in the direction her boyfriend had ridden off in earlier. She’s just witnessed the spectacle of Qinawi’s attack on Hannuma and his capture. Her own affair had been a spectacle for Qinawi’s interest, but now their positions are reversed. We can only imagine what she might be thinking, but we’ve seen a more complete picture of Qinawi’s story than she has. The movie has drained his case of any sensationalism, so that we can see the events not as a newspaper report or as a “true crime” story, but as a sad yet preventable tale of human beings not so different from ourselves.
CONNECTIONS:
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari – Story introduced as something comparatively strange; story of a criminal and his delusions; protagonist placed in a straitjacket at the end
Night Train – Set in or among trains; newspapers represent sensationalism; killer or attempted killer who’s more pathetic than wicked
Les bonnes femmes – Catalogue of ways that men restrict women; insertions of clocks