Cairo Station

Cairo Station Review

Directed by Youssef Chahine

1958 ‧ Drama/Crime ‧ 1h 35m

IMDB 7.7/10       Rotten Tomatoes 100%    My Rating ★★★

Youssef Chahine's 1958 film Cairo Station is quite the experience from the start to finish of the fairly short runtime. The film is a quite dramatic character study on the odd Qinawi (played by Youssef Chahine himself) and his infatuation with a woman named Hannouma (played by Hind Rostom) who is simply not interested in him. Qinawi's intense passionate feelings towards Hannouma leads him towards a crazy pathway all happening within the chaotic setting of Cairo Station in Egypt. The movie begins with a narration introducing Qinawi and how he was a bit of a homeless strange man living in the station and starts the film off with a foreshadowing quote: "Poor Qinawi, how could anyone have forseen his end?" A very intriguing start for sure and one that grabs the audience right away and keeps us waiting to see this character's certain demise.  

There are a fair few characters outside of Qinawi and Hannouma's dynamic story but none so many that stood out and a few that just flat out confused me? Chahine seems to have put most of his character writing into Qinawi and Hannouma and while these characters are excellent and intriguing some of the other characters plot lines felt vague and a bit confusing. Near the beginning of the film a worker in the train station injures his hand and his boss still forces him to work through his injury. This isn't the first time this has happened with these train station workers so they decide to strike up a union. This plot line seems to go basically nowhere after halfway through the film and doesn't really add anything to the story other than how bad the conditions for working in Cairo Station are. Another strange addition to the story is between a girl in a floral dress and her boyfriend (I think?) these two basically don't have any lines of dialogue really other than to flaunt their romance in the train station for Qinawi to stare at and yearn for a romantic partner of his own. These few gripes did lower my score of the overall film but I may have gotten confused and missed a few details connecting these other plot lines with the ones of the two main characters. 

Now for the most interesting part of this film: the delusional passion of Qinawi and the cheerful & lively woman he pines after, Hannouma. The way Qinawi acts made me wonder about his mental state since this character seems to show some signs of possibly a mental handicap or mental illness possibly. Most of the characters in the film describe him as "lame" and his childlike way of handling situations and borderline psychotic actions later definitely seem to imply some sort of mental issue. One thing is for sure though, Qinawi is very delusional and schemes his way towards ruining Hannouma's engagement to another man through quite gruesome measures. Qinawi's rather seemingly tragic life heavily contrasts with the very cheerful and confident Hannnouma who is seen throughout the movie to be very light hearted and has a great sense of humor as well as being quite content and confident with herself. These characteristics are what Qinawi appears to fall for and he wants her all for himself which leads him towards the actions in the unexpected and intense conclusion. A lot of aspects of this film were quite daring for the time period it came out during and I greatly respect Youssef Chahine for exploring these issues when not many other people dared to do so at the time. Richard Brody from The New Yorker writes, "Meanwhile, at the station, Hanouma, a raucous-voiced young Mother Courage, and her all-female band of freelance soft-drink peddlers struggle to break an official venders’ cartel; her fiancé, a porter, tries to unionize his colleagues despite the opposition of their corrupt boss; a proto-feminist organization protests domestic subservience; and a travelling band of bluejeaned rockers—featuring a funky accordionist and an astonishingly expressive female dancer—outrage religious traditionalists." Cairo Station is truly an important film for its time although not entirely my preference since I find older movies harder to watch it was still quite enjoyable and worth a watch. 3/5!