Egyptian film-maker Omar El Zohairy is a brilliant emerging talent with an impressive professional pedigree; he is a former assistant to Yousry Nasrallah (who himself started out as assistant to the celebrated Youssef Chahine) and has won festival prizes with this, his debut feature. It’s a comedy with a little of Woody Allen or Franz Kafka – though with not much of the famous Emily Dickinson quote about what hope is. It is also a social-surrealist parable about a woman’s place in a man’s world. Higher than the animals? Lower than the animals? El Zohairy conjures something elegant and mysterious with a deadpan wit, which coolly encases its compassion. He frames his shots with superb compositional flair – this film actually reminded me of another Egyptian film, Ibrahim El-Batout’s Winter of Discontent. And there’s some excellent child acting and baby acting.
The scene is a cramped, squalid flat inhabited by a boorish factory worker (Samy Bassiouny), always grandly announcing the things he’ll buy for the family someday. His unsmiling put-upon wife is played by Demyana Nassar, who shows that her character is almost catatonic with the tensions caused by making do for their three kids on the housekeeping money he gives her. And in this film the simple activity of counting out cash is vitally important, a recurring image connected with power. People are always giving money, taking money, or making deals in an atmosphere of shabby secrecy and shame. One day, the father invites all his mates as well as a high-up figure he oleaginously calls “Boss” to the flat for his son’s birthday party. (It appears that his workplace loans cash for this sort of thing.)
There’s also an entertainer: a cheesy magician who accidentally turns the dad into a chicken and can’t turn him back. This magician flees town with his assistant, leaving this chicken that the mum has to keep alive; it is a sacred animal, more sacred even than a human husband, and she has to take extra grim jobs to pay the bills. She finds that the “Boss” now has designs on her; being found attractive again is something about which she is ambivalent, although it does elicit from her a rare smile. But she needs her son to work at the factory to make ends meet, and the owners will only agree if she can provide official documentation about her husband’s disappearance, or disability, or whatever it’s supposed to be. Alternatively she can produce some male person to be certified as her debilitated husband, a need which ties up with the disturbing image at the film’s very beginning.
So what is this woman’s situation? Is she a widow, a divorcee, a deserted woman? All of these or none? Her bizarre position is the very epitome of an unhappy wife and mother’s burdensome loneliness. Her chicken husband is not much less intimate or communicative or sensitive now than he was in human form. And in his impassive chickenness, he doesn’t even meet basic levels of spousal decency and respect.
El Zohairy shows us that there is something weird and hilarious in the simple form of this animal, plumply feathered with huge unwieldy claws. But the comedy of having a chicken around the house is undercut by the explicit violence of the meatpacking job the wife has to take. And the punchline of the joke, if it is a joke, is that humans have absurd animal bodies as well. In this movie, as in a Woody Allen comedy of a similar nature, there is a kind of narrative tension or trajectory set up at the very beginning: when and how is the husband going to be retransformed? The answer, when it comes, is unexpected and puts its audience off-balance, though the whole story has itself been off-balance. What an intriguing film; it will tickle you.
• Feathers is available from 10 July on BFI Player in the UK and is available now on SBS On Demand in Australia.
