Radwan El-Kashef – Lieah ya banafsieg AKA Violets Are Blue AKA Why, Violets? (1993)
A portrayal of the lives of four friends who have different dreams and aspirations; Ahmed falls in love with a girl he saw once, Sayed gets in trouble when he sells the laboratory animals, Abbas who is married to a woman that doesn’t love him, and Ali who works in illegal operations.
kanafani@letterboxd wrote:
Depictions of the popular “hara”, or alley, have a long tradition in Egyptian literature and cinema, from the novels of Naguib Mahfouz, to the movies of Salah Abou Seif: self-contained, underprivileged neighborhoods in overpopulated cities, almost cut off from the outside world, teaming with characters and stories representing a cross-section of the Egyptian urban poor.
This movie is a distinguished entry in this genre. It achieves a novelistic density that is reminiscent of the stories of Ibrahim Aslan and other modernist writers (director Radwan El-Kashef fittingly opens the movie with a dedication to “the generation of Egyptian writers of the sixties”). It centers on the friendship of three men: Abbas, a hoodlum with a heart of gold, living on the edge of legality; Sayed, a sexually repressed animal lab technician who sells test rabbits to butchers for extra income; and Ahmad (Farouk El Feshawi in a seminal role), a man nearing an impasse, longing to escape the narrow confines of the neighborhood, awaiting the return of the semi-mythical figure of Ali Bobby, a childhood friend who left the alley to pursue a life of high-stakes crime. The three men moonlight as wedding entertainers, which is the conduit to several mirthful explosions of song and dance throughout the movie, painfully contrasting with their daily struggles.
There is a host of other memorable characters: An unemployed, blind man who still dreams of making it big as a singer; an alcoholic wagon worker whose sons keep dying one by one; a young girl who has the misfortune of falling in love with the emotionally stunted Ahmad…
The movie is very funny, and is quite radical in its usage of colorful, popular dialect, which sometimes sounds like a foreign language only spoken in this neighborhood. But there is an unbelievable sense of sadness and grief at its heart, something I’ve rarely experienced: the pain of lost dreams and wrecked friendships, the sorrow of a humanity trapped in an unforgiving world, but still finding a way to pluck moments of triumph along the way. The final scene, where the three friends gather in the desert for one more performance, this time with no audience, just wrecked me.
Why.Violet.1993.WEB-DL.720p.x264.mkv General Container: Matroska Runtime: 1 h 57 min Size: 1.20 GiB Video Codec: x264 Resolution: 1280x720 ~> 1332x720 Aspect ratio: 1.85:1 Frame rate: 25.000 fps Bit rate: 1 386 kb/s BPP: 0.060 Audio #1: 2.0ch AAC LC @ 83.9 kb/s
https://nitro.download/view/AE81B396DE265DD/Why.Violet.1993.WEB-DL.720p.x264.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/37EB69577168327/WhyViolet.srt
Language(s):Arabic
Subtitles:English
