Yasmin Adel - Cairo
A man and woman meet and fall in love, then conflict and climax, and finally a happy ending, thus came the construction of the majority of romantic films from the beginnings of the Egyptian cinema until now, but this does not negate the reality of the changes that affected love in the cinema, especially with the technological development and the moral deterioration whose impact clearly appeared on Collective awareness and art makers are keen to monitor it during their works.
From the answers to WhatsApp
“I love you and I want you to love me, not to annihilate your being in my being or the entity of any human being,” thus stated in the speech of Hussein (Saleh Selim) to Layla (Faten Hamama) in the movie “Open Door” (1963) directed by Henry Barakat and written by Latifa Al-Zayat. , And its events revolve around a girl who believes in freedom and the importance of having her own opinion.
However, her family and the community around her refuse to allow her to practice what she believes in, and because of an immature emotional experience that decides to walk behind everyone's thoughts, before she returns and insists on victory for herself, strengthened by the presence of Hussein who believes in her and pushes her to fulfill her dream even if she does not exchange love.
Going back, we will find that the speeches have long been a cornerstone of many romantic films, and they have also appeared in the films "The Second Meeting", "The River of Love", "Message to an Unknown Woman", "Lost Love", "Girls and Summer", And "Love in the Dungeon" and others.
In the films of recent years, the social media platforms and the communication program "WhatsApp" replaced the speeches, which we saw in films such as "Hebita" and "Secondary Girls", but they succeeded as a means of communication and were characterized by smooth and speed, but they lost the idea of their intimacy and the complexity that they used to The story increases romance and creates a struggle that the heroes seek to overcome.
The link of death
The cinema of Muhammad Khan - which was characterized by its extreme realism and its victory for the marginalized from the seventies until his death in 2016 - comes as a link that succeeded in maintaining the line of romantic cinema with a feminist character, stretched out to his integrity between the past and the present.
In the 1980s, Nawal, the heroine of "A date for dinner", who suffers from her husband's negligence and emotional apathy, then separated from him, before she met my thanksgiving that was overwhelmed by love, which pushed her divorce to revenge, so she did not hesitate to respond, even if that cost her her life.
In 2007, Khan gave us a glimpse into the life of Najwa, the heroine of "The Heliopolis Apartment," a school of Upper Egypt music who takes a school trip to Cairo to find her old teacher. What she did not count was to be on a date with the love that I had always heard about in the songs.
In 2014, we got acquainted with him with the twentieth year-old "factory girl" who works in a garment factory, and despite the harsh reality and poverty that weaves his strings around her world, she believes in love as an ideal means for happiness and getting out of the cocoon that her narrow-minded society holds inside her.
Is romance disappeared or differed?
A follower of Egyptian cinema will notice a decline in the number of romantic films produced annually, while action, crime and random films are overshadowed by the scene, on the one hand because emotional films achieve lower profits, and on the other hand because the largest segment of cinema pioneers are young people who follow Mohamed Ramadan and fans of festive songs Looking for world-like movies.
Unfortunately, even the few romantic films produced by the cinema have become questionable and resentful, while the films - which are described as "light romantic - comic" in the time of black and white - shed light on the issue of what the majority of contemporary films have come in terms of form and object.
In the fifties the movie "Ah Mena Eve" was released, which focused on a businesswoman and an association for the defense of women's rights. She accidentally meets a painter who tries to approach her in various ways, and despite her strike on marriage, he succeeds in entrapping her with his love to discover that the link does not necessarily mean that she becomes a leader or marginalized .
In the 1960s, we saw the movie "My wife is a general manager", which tells of a project manager who was surprised to move his wife to his workplace and occupied the position of general manager, so he decided to pretend that he did not know her in order to preserve his face in front of his colleagues, which exposed them to comic and confrontational situations when their affairs are revealed to everyone.
This indicates that the old romantic films were, in their simplicity, victorious for women and their rights, even if their creators mocked the problems sarcastically, while some contemporary films came in contrast, as if time is back.
In 2007, we saw the movie "Taymour and Shafika", whose events revolved around a young man and girl who loved each other from a young age, and despite their pledge to marry, the young man's insistence that things go according to his opinions and his judgment alone lead to the failure of the relationship, before the heroine returns and responds to his demands and leaves her work as a minister to marry him .
As for the movie “Ahwak”, which was released in 2015, despite being released at the time of its release, it included vulgar verbal content that continued throughout the work, amid sexual revelations that became more like a repeated habit in Tamer Hosni’s films and most modern films. Is this the kind of love that the audience really wants? More importantly, what can we do while romantic cinema, as we know it, is close to extinction?