Cairo Station (1958)
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Cairo Station Movie Review
Cairo Station is a 1958 Egyptian drama film directed by Youssef Chahine and starring Farid Shawqi. It’s such a good, emotionally effective movie.
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“Get a grip on reality“
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It follows a poor newspaper seller who is smitten and eventually obsessed with a woman who is not interested in him at all because he has no money. Eventually, that all leads to a tragedy in the third act. I really liked the film’s plot as it deals with the rich and poor so well, the divide in the Egyptian society as well as how a man who isn’t ambitious or rich has a hard time finding love. That last one is particularly effective here and so moving.
My only and major problem with the film is its high number of character which came as the detractor to the overall narrative. Yes, most are well realized, but still there were too many of them and a simpler, more focused approach would have done wonders to this movie and made it an instant classic. It’s still a very good film, but not as amazing as it could have been.
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Farid Shawqi is terrific in the main role and so well cast. Abu Siri is such a tragic figure whom you easily relate to and feel sorry for. He’s the heart of the film and the reason why the film stood the test of time so well. Hannuma is a bitch, but she’s essential to the plot and so well acted and depicted. The moments between the two that we get are all terrific. All the other characters are solid and they certainly serve their purpose, but again they aren’t as important in the essential narrative which was a problem for me.
There is no denying Cairo Station’s technicalities which are all incredible. It’s very interesting seeing an Egyptian film from the fifties be this good and this on par with its American counterparts of the time and I could definitely see from the first moments of the film how this picture came out during their cinema’s Golden Age.
The cinematography is strikingly superb as the film is polished in its look and so gorgeously shot with many beautiful cinematic moments and strong romantic as well as noirish even sequences. The dialogue is also very good and the same goes for the direction from Youssef Chahine which is evidently great and he here showcased enormous directorial talents.
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The film is so well acted across the board and obviously well scored. Its score is tender, vibrant and almost operatic in quality. The entire movie has that romantic atmosphere to it, a classical atmosphere which I certainly enjoyed to pieces, but it’s also diverse in terms of the genres as it’s also a social drama and it ended as a crime flick of sorts. It’s effective on all fronts and I just wish that its runtime was much longer as the storyline demanded it. But other than that and too many characters, it’s obviously a major work of Egyptian cinema.
Although definitely overly short in runtime and filled with too many characters, Cairo Station is nonetheless a very admirable film which is gorgeously shot, beautifully scored and all around a wonderfully old-fashioned, cinematic movie. The acting is good across the board, the main character is such a tragic figure easy to empathize with and the film deftly shifts genres from a romance to a social drama to a crime flick.
