CAIRO -- A ballad drifted from the movie screen. The lyrics mourned a lost love, not an unusual climax for an Egyptian film. But this lost love was a place across the sea.
"New York," the singer asked, "why do you resist tenderness?"
"America has changed," laments filmmaker Youssef Chahine, now 78.
(2002 Photo Mohammad Sehety -- AP)
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It was music for the closing credits of "Alexandria . . . New York," the newest film by Egypt's leading director, Youssef Chahine. It is a cinematic divorce paper. Chahine said he had long admired the United States and its biggest city, but now he has made a film brimming with resentment.
The film, set to open in Cairo next week, is about an aging Arab moviemaker who returns to New York after some years, meets an old lover and discovers he fathered a son by her. But the son rejects the father and, in the end, the father rejects the son. The relation is a melodramatic metaphor for relations between the United States and Arabs. "The violence which started in Hiroshima ends with you," the father cries out at the son at one point.
In Cairo's entertainment world these days, it's hard to escape a wave of anti-Americanism. Often, a sure way to fill a theater is to lambaste U.S. foreign policy, cultural habits or military activity. One recent comedy lampooning the United States featured an exploding Statue of Liberty outside the lobby. Another stage production included a randy caricature of an American general and played to packed houses for four months.
The sentiment driving such works is widespread across the Arab world, a recent poll showed. Ninety-three percent of people surveyed in Jordan in March had a somewhat or very unfavorable view of the United States, according to the study by the Pew Research Center. In Morocco, the figure was 68 percent.
The invasion of Iraq and U.S. support for Israel in the conflict with the Palestinians are the prime causes of this trend, many political analysts say. A majority of the Arabs in the Pew poll said the United States attacked Iraq for oil, to protect Israel or to weaken the Muslim world.
In Egypt, the sentiments color popular music as well as film. Shaaban Abdel Rehim, one of the country's most popular purveyors of shaabi music, a kind of Egyptian funk, is turning out hit after hit critical of President Bush, his policies in Iraq, his allies in the Arab world and Israel.
Abdel Rehim's first bestseller was a thumping, danceable number called "I Hate Israel." His latest is called "Attack on Iraq." The music can be heard all over Cairo -- in cabs, in cafes and on the little cruise boats that take tourists on jaunts on the Nile River.
Some of the popular offerings are the work of long opposed to the decades-old alliance between the Egyptian government and the United States. But others are from newcomers to this point of view.
In Chahine's case, disillusionment represents a painful personal journey. "I studied in the United States," he said in his downtown Cairo offices recently. "Sixty years ago, I fell in love with the United States. But things have changed -- America has changed."
For decades, Chahine has made unbendingly sentimental films. He claims artistic descent from American moviemakers of the 1930s and '40s and fills his work with handsome young characters in love. Sometimes, he puts fantasy dance numbers in the middle of it all. On occasion, he has bucked conservative Middle Eastern tradition by portraying homosexual infatuation.
Chahine said that he, like many Egyptians, is disturbed by the relentless violence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as Iraq. "All the time I am faced by these scenes, every night on TV. We Arabs feel rejection. But if it was only us, it may not matter. It seems it is also 1 billion Muslims are being rejected," he said.
He says he longs for the days of Busby Berkeley musicals, Fred Astaire dance numbers and Frank Sinatra crooning. Instead, he finds exploding cars and computerized robots. "All we see is Spider-Men and musclemen like Stallone and Willis," he said, referring to action stars Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis. "America has become violent like the new movies."
