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The Nightingale’s Prayer Movie Review

The Nightingale’s Prayer is a 1959 Egyptian drama film directed by Henry Barakat and starring Faten Hamama and Ahmed Mazhar. It’s largely a masterful film of classic Egyptian cinema.

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“You pretend to be cautious when you approach me“

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Amna and her sister Hanady leave their village to work as servants. When Hanady gets killed, Amna vows to find the killer and avenge her death. By moving to this rich man’s house, she plans to kill him, but all of her plans fail. She then tries to ruin him by teasing him to fall in love with her, which does happen, but she ends up falling for him as well.

Released at the height of classic Egyptian cinema, this movie is consistently ranked among the finest feature films that this country has to offer, and for many great reasons. Watching it myself, I was taken aback by just how stupendously crafted this production was. It rivaled the best that Hollywood had to offer back in this day and it’s a triumph of the melodrama genre.

Though the causes behind the protagonist’s sister’s death weren’t quite plausible and/or explained properly, this death served as the catalyst for such a terrific, impressively melodramatic story that revealed itself in the second half. Again, the first half is pretty good, but it pretty much serves to build up the second half, which is where the meat of the story lies.

I had an absolute blast watching the latter half of this movie. The various ways that Amna tries to seduce her master were very entertaining to follow and just seeing his sexual frustrations play out was quite amusing. Rarely has a movie depicted a male-female dynamic in this realistic and complex manner.

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None of this would have worked had it not been for tremendous characterization that the film employed. Every single character here felt very much real, clearly reminding the viewer that this screenplay was based on a novel as only a literary work could produce such superbly painted personalities.

Both of the main characters have their sidekicks who help them out with advice. The woman helping out Amna was very funny and her lines of dialogue were consistently witty. The uncle character was overly villainous in my opinion, but every other personality was memorably and realistically realized.

The engineer is an instantly iconic character. He is your typical rich guy who has it all, but when he encounters this woman who wouldn’t easily be seduced like all others, he is intrigued and this spells out his doom. Ahmed Mazhar was terrific in such a powerful, layered performance.

But it is Faten Hamama, a renowned Egyptian actress, who absolutely stole this movie. Her acting here is outstanding as she sold all of the character’s emotions and her arc that featured a shift from naïve to manipulative. The role is very well written, but Hamama elevated Amna to even greater heights, resulting in one of the most iconic protagonists in all of melodrama.

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The Nightingale’s Prayer also features simply brilliant dialogue as every line is believable, memorable and either interesting or quite funny in its observational nature. Some moments are even poetic. The romantic elements were splendid as the film’s emotionally resonant arc was consistently powerful. The pacing of the first half was not great, but the second half was riveting throughout. The black-and-white cinematography is gorgeous, especially of the interiors, while the score is quite strong and the movie’s flashback structure and editing are very cinematic and advanced for this time. Henry Barakat’s directing is superb too.