Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: Ayten Amin
Starring: Bassant Ahmed, Basmala Elghaiesh, Hussein Ghanem
Have you ever noticed how much time kids spend on their phones?! When you
see them on the bus, they’re on their phones, when they’re being dragged
around Asda by mum and dad they’re obsessively scrolling through their
phones, and the other day, right, I saw two kids, must have been about 15,
sitting next to each other in the park, but both of them were on their
phones! Unbelievable! When I was their age, to fill the day we used to hit
a can down the street with a stick and smash people’s windows at night and
that was good enough for us. It’s almost as if kids today would rather
interact with the universe at large via the miracle of mass media
applications rather than, I dunno, look out of the window.
Ayten Amin (director, with script duties shared by
Mahmoud Ezzat) has certainly picked up on this contemporary habit,
and in Souad the filmmaker explores the complex relationship
which the titular character (Bassant Ahmed), a late teen girl
living in a Nile Delta city, has with social media, and the ensuing
confliction of persona and person.
The Egyptian setting is central to Souad’s narrative. Grim and dusty, with its denizens precisely segregated
according to gender, age, social status (let’s not mention sexuality),
cinematographer Maged Nader’s camera captures the mugginess of this
punishingly urban milieu with tight frames and restless pacing.
The social and familial expectations which are placed upon Souad, and her
younger sister Rabab (Basmala Elghaiesh), are manifest, too, and
just as stifling as her surroundings. Even before imaginative uses of
online personas come into play, we see Souad on the bus, chatting to
consecutive passengers who share her seat: how she presents herself
radically differs in each encounter, with Souad playing up and
exaggerating aspects of her life to suit each audience. It’s a cute scene,
which outlines what teenagers do daily out of necessity (imagine having to
be a different person for your family, for friends, for teachers) but also
their own amusement (learning who they are through social role play).
Away from her parents and with her girlfriends, Souad is perhaps allowed
to be more herself; affectionately mocking her religion and exploring her
own burgeoning womanhood. And then, away from her pals, Souad again subtly
reconfigures who she is for her online boyfriend, with messages that are
less sexting than they are clumsily sensual and romantic (quixoting?).
For its first half, Souad ambles along presenting the
layered existence of its central character’s life, posing us questions by
implication. The phone is freedom, a mini oxygen tank from which Soaud
takes vital gasps of air to help her navigate this unventilated urban
jungle (an aside: as someone with quite a few young uns in the extended
family, I have to say that I don’t see that kids are all that obsessed
with their phones. And when they do use social media it's usually
self-expressive; creating amateur aesthetics via Insta, indulging in the
reckless creativity of TikTok. It’s reactionary adults who are negatively
preoccupied by Facebook, balking in received terror at the world and
obsessing over what other people are doing).
You do wonder, though, half an hour in of a 90 minute movie which featured
at Cannes, if this is all Amin has to offer - hanging out with these two
sisters in their happy-go-lucky but compromised lifestyles. If it was,
that would be ok. These kids are immensely likeable, and the filmmaking
immersive and affecting. However, if you are averse to *SPOILERS* then skip the rest of this paragraph and come back for the last
one..... Don’t get too attached to the titular character though, as around
halfway through she drops out of the movie. Literally, as she apparently
‘falls off a balcony whilst checking the curtains’ (a weird fate which the
film plays as ominously ambiguous). The rest of the film is taken up by
Rabab tracking down her sister’s so-so boyfriend, a ‘social influencer’
who seems far less invested in the relationship than poor old Souad was.
The contrast between this bozo’s privilege and Soaud’s aspirational
middle-class background, and the pressures put upon her gender, are
manifest.
For a film which seems to be patently ‘about something’, however,
Soaud doesn’t have a great deal to say; what it instead
presents are nebulous, yet occasionally striking, ideas about the shifting
sands of teenage identity. In one such moment, a bereaved father accesses
his child’s phone, and plaintively zooms in on pics of her out shopping,
messing about with friends (honestly, I was in bits - I could barely
breathe and had to pause for 10 minutes). Who was this person, really?
With her character obscured within differing social constraints, atomised
across varying digital interactions. The father desperately scrutinises
these constructed versions of a person who remains now, as then,
ultimately unknowable.
Souad is in UK cinemas from August
27th.
