Adieu Bonaparte

Was it a mere coincidence that I watched Adieu Bonaparte, Youssef Chahine's mid 80s movie, twice during the invasion of Iraq 2 years ago, and on two different TV channels? As most of Chahine's movies, Adieu Bonaparte is not that popular with the audience in the Arab world, and thus you don't see it on TV that frequently. Taking into account that all what I can get here in the US is 9 Arabic TV channels, I couldn't overlook that coincidence, if it was one.

This controversial movie tells the story of Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt in 1798. It has been criticized heavily by Egyptian movie critics who saw it sympathetic to the invasion. Some critics blamed it to the French co-production, while others blamed Chahine's political views, especially that he was also the script writer.

Most probably critics expected a reel dedicated to vilify everything French while glorifying the brave Egyptian resistance to the invasion. At least this was the typical theme of the very few Arabic movies that dealt with colonialism. In that sense, Chahine didn't fully disappoint them. The movie showed both the brave resistance and the colonial brutality. Chahine's sin though was that he went beyond the typical clichés and tried to honestly analyze the whole situation, and that's where the real brilliance of this movie resides.

The plot focuses on a microcosm of the Egyptian society at the time: a family with three youthful sons. The eldest believes the French are waging another Crusade on Egypt, and it's the responsibility of the Egyptians to side by the Mamluks, who have been exploitively ruling Egypt on behalf of the Ottoman Sultan, in front of the French occupation. The middle brother is taken by the French culture and technology, and believes that the Mamluks are no better than the French. Between the two extremes, the youngest is always lost and distracted.

In spite of their differences, the three brothers join the Egyptian resistance in Cairo. They were all against the occupation, but they still maintained their differences when it comes to the French culture. The middle brother befriends a French officer, who is more of a pacifist intellectual than a soldier, and he frequently visits the French barracks together with his younger brother. The dialogues they have reflected the cultural intercourse that implicitly took place between the Egyptians and the French during those years.

If you replace the words "Egyptian", "French" and "Mamluks" from the previous paragraphs with the words "Iraqi", "American" and "Saddam" you will see why I watched that movie twice in a couple of weeks when I was supposed to spend that time watching the war coverage. The resemblance really struck me at the time. It's the same story of choosing the lesser of the two evils: the Mamluks and the French on one side, and Saddam and the Americans on the other. Napoleon Bonaparte claimed to the Egyptians that he came to liberate them from the injustices they suffered under the Mamluks, and he was definitely right about the injustices and suffering part. More than two hundred years later, we now know that the whole thing was about the strategic location of Egypt, and Bonaparte's campaign was just one move in his big chess game against the British empire at the time.

Now that Saddam is together with the Mamluks in the trash heap of history, do any of the three Iraqi brothers still believe that "liberation" tone? And in the 21st century superpower single-player (so far) chess game, what will be the next move? During the cold war the biggest fear in the Arab world was of becoming chess pieces, so how do we feel now being just a part of the checkered board with pieces from all over the world stepping on our necks? And the checkering continues...