El Sett: Why did the Saudi-backed biopic about Umm Kulthum flop?
It was supposed to be the event film of the year: a biopic of the Arab world’s most enduring singer, helmed by Marwan Hamed, one of Egypt’s most commercially successful filmmakers and written by Ahmed Mourad, the nation’s current best-selling author.
A co-production between Synergy, Egypt’s biggest film and TV company (owned by military intelligence), and Big Time Studio, the newly formed entertainment corporation run by Turki al-Sheikh, chairman of Saudi Arabia’s General Entertainment Authority and the de facto showrunner of the entertainment industry in the kingdom.
With a price tag of $8m excluding marketing, and a star-studded cast of some of the country’s most bankable actors, El Sett (The Woman, one of the many titles given to Umm Kulthum) was expected to smash box-office records and introduce a new generation to a mythical figure who remained enigmatic both in life and after death.
Alas that did not happen. Eight weeks after its release in Egypt and across the region, in one of the widest releases for any Egyptian film this century, El Sett has been a colossal flop, grossing less than $2m to date.
In Egypt, it was met with a storm of controversy, with pundits accusing it of tarnishing Umm Kulthum’s image.
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Reviews were sharply mixed, and the reception among Egyptian viewers has been overwhelmingly hostile.
The unexpected failure of El Sett can now be regarded as a cautionary tale: a reminder that Egyptians remain unwilling to accept anything but a sanitised depiction of their icons, and yet another indication of the growing popular disdain toward Saudi influence in the nation’s entertainment industry.
A strong start
The film opens in Paris, shortly before Umm Kulthum’s legendary 1967 concert at L’Olympia - her sole performance outside the Arab world - for which she was reportedly paid twice the salary of Maria Callas.
The concert was held on 13 November, five months after the Six-Day War.
The mood in the theatre, as the film accurately captures, is fraught with tension. The audience is divided between the politically neutral lovers of El Sett and Arab listeners seeking refuge in her voice from the crushing defeat by Israel and the collapse of the Arab nationalist project.
Under heavy layers of makeup, Mona Zaki emerges as the sixty-something songstress. Cool and extraordinarily poised, she signals her band to pack up and leave when the director of the famous Parisian theatre asks her to defuse the heated atmosphere and avoid politics.
“We don’t speak the same language,” she tells him in French.
He caves in. She steadily walks to the stage to be greeted with a tornado of applause. As the concert opens with her late-career masterpiece Enta Omri, she suddenly and mysteriously collapses.
The title of the picture is plastered on screen. And it is practically all downhill from there.
Lacking ideology
The film recounts Umm Kulthum’s story in chronological order as it intermittently, and pointlessly, jumps forward to the monumental concert.
Born Fatima Ibrahim el-Sayyid el-Beltagi, Mourad and Hamed trace the singer’s humble beginnings as the daughter of an overprotective rural imam turned religious band leader, who disguised her as a boy in fear of scandal.
As a little girl with an astonishing voice, Umm Kulthum read aloud the Quran at local weddings; her wages consisting of a meal and a bottle of soda.
She was still performing as a boy in her late teens when she began to attract the attention of singers and composers alike.
Soon, despite her father’s hesitation, she was taken to Cairo, where she initially performed in nightclubs.
The temptation of money convinced her father to allow her to switch gears from Quranic recitation to traditional Arabic singing.
One of the movie’s significant flaws is that the gender fluidity embodied by the pre-fame Umm Kulthum goes entirely unexamined, setting the tone for a picture too tame to dig deeper into the thornier issues that defined the singer’s life and art.
To lend some weight and relevance to the exceedingly thin material, Hamed and Mourad strive to render Umm Kulthum as a feminist icon who dwarfed the men around her, including her father, and fully controlled her own destiny.
Yet because El Sett is formulated as a bombastic Hollywood-style production with no discernible ideology, the feminism boils down to cunning business dealings and fanatical domination of her orchestra.
Art plays little role in this version of Umm Kulthum’s story; her life pursuit is capitalist through and through.
Her fervent desire for social climbing is derived not from tangible insecurity, but from a fixation on maintaining maximum control - something Mourad naively and unconvincingly attempts to frame as a vague feminist undertaking.
Romances and politics
This faint feminist framework collapses under the weight of the singer’s love life, which occupies the larger part of the rushed narrative.
Mourad charts her extensively documented romances: her rejection of two frequent collaborators, the poet Ahmed Ramy (Mohammed Farrag) and composer Mohamed el-Qasabgi (Tamer Nabil); her aborted affair with King Farouk’s uncle, Sherif Sabri Pasha (Karim Abdel-Aziz), which was vehemently dismissed by the royal court.
There is also her disastrous and short-lived marriage to musician Mahmoud el-Sherif (Sedky Sakhar), which became prime fodder for gossip magazines; and her final marriage to her physician Hassan el-Hifnawy (Ahmed Amin), who, like el-Sherif, was several years her junior.
For all her prowess and faux independence, Mourad’s Umm Kulthum ultimately comes off as a forlorn waif in a futile search for marital happiness and romantic love.
Her struggle for independence is negated by what the writer misleadingly depicts as a lifelong quest for fulfilment through another man; and it is not until she meets Hifnawy that she finds balance and tranquillity.
There is little more to Mourad’s sketch of Umm Kulthum than that characterisation.
The legendary vocalist was famously protective of her image, revealing only what reinforced her reputation as the strong-headed, patriotic artist obsessed with perfectionism.
Mourad and Hamed never dare to challenge the myth behind the woman, nor do they question her famously flippant politics.
Umm Kulthum sang for the king at a time when anti-monarchy sentiment was beginning to brew. And after a very brief pause in performing during the start of Nasser’s reign (erroneously depicted in the film as substantially longer), she embraced the 1952 coup d’etat that brought an end to the monarchy.
After the 1967 defeat, she toured the country to mobilise the masses and raise funds for the army.
Her love for Egypt has never been questioned; her true political alliances, which Hamed and Mourad never interrogate, remain a black hole.
Less flattering aspects of her life and career have been deliberately ignored: her well-documented rivalries with Mounira el-Mahdeya and Syrian singer Asmahan, and her growing isolation from the working class.
Also missing is her notorious threat to dissident poet Ahmed Fouad Negm to “wreck his life” after he wrote the notorious slandering poem Kalb El Sett (The Dog of the Lady), which took a swipe at her privileges and indifference when her dog attacked and bit a poor student.
Comparisons to previous depictions
El Sett is not the first dramatic work about Umm Kulthum. A hugely popular 1999, 30-episode TV series positioned itself as the definitive account of her life and work.
The ill-fated film Kawkab El-Sharq (Star of the East), poorly directed by Mohammed Fadel, arrived the same year but tanked at the box office.
Celebrated Iranian artist and filmmaker Shirin Neshat’s meta-biographical drama Looking for Oum Kulthum (2017), a European-Arab production, touched upon different facets of her life in a story about a Persian filmmaker striving to make a film about her.
All three works, especially the Egyptian ones, were marked by profound reverence and hagiographic representation, catering to an audience unreceptive to multilayered depictions of the singer.
Hamed and Mourad, the most successful writer-director team of contemporary Egyptian cinema, admittedly had little chance of curbing this trend.
But then why realise such a project at all if there is nothing remotely new to explore about Umm Kulthum?
Hamed, arguably the most accomplished action director in the Arab world, does not spare the use of every filmmaking tool at his disposal, for reasons unknown.
Random switching between black-and-white and colour; slow-motion; preening crane shots; invasive close-ups…there is no cohesive visual strategy behind Hamed’s addictive knack for unjustifiable excess.
What about the music?
Yet the most unforgivable, most maddening aspect of El Sett is its befuddling approach to Umm Kulthum’s music.
Mourad and Hamed do not spend a minute of the film’s two-and-a-half-hour duration explaining or reflecting on what made her music so unique and so transcendent.
The subtle innovations she brought to traditional Arab music, her break with tradition that defied maqam conventions, her daringly ingenious vocal ornamentations, and, most of all, her technical genius that put her peers in the shade - none of this is mentioned, let alone explored.
Hamed never manages to capture the essence of her music; his Hollywood-like garish visuals, fast cutting, and compressed storytelling leave no space for contemplation
The magnificence of Umm Kulthum’s art is boorishly reduced to the strength of her voice.
The drama is largely set against a bizarrely grungy score by acclaimed composer Hesham Nazih that contrasts with, and ultimately obscures, the great singer’s music, itself unjustifiably kept to a minimum.
Umm Kulthum’s complex brand of tarab contains a meditative quality responsible for engendering a state of ecstasy, unfolding slowly and steadily over the one-hour-plus average duration of her songs.
Hamed never manages to capture the essence of her music; his Hollywood-like garish visuals, fast cutting, and compressed storytelling leave no space for contemplation.
It is a mismatch of aesthetics and subject - or, more bluntly, of director and subject.
A distrust of Saudi involvement
What the film most notably lacks is a point of view: stylistic, political, philosophical. It is an intellectually bankrupt piece of unadventurous filmmaking.
The astonishing derision with which El Sett was met in Egypt may have less to do with these formal and narrative gaffes than with a growing suspicion and weariness toward Saudi influence in Egyptian TV and film.
Various conservative TV commentators rejected Mourad’s earthly portrayal of the national icon, describing a scene in which Umm Kulthum is shown smoking a cigarette as an act of blasphemy.
The control she exerts over her band and business was regarded as uncomplimentary and overly assertive, while her fixation on money was interpreted as stinginess.
It is highly unlikely that Saudis had any creative say in the making of the film.
Debate on El Sett exploded when renowned theatre and TV actor-director Mohamed Sobhi described the film, which he had not even watched, as a “conspiratorial act to sabotage Egypt’s symbols,” in a sly finger-pointing exercise toward Turki al-Sheikh and Saudi investment.
Egyptian TV hosts Amr Adib and Yasmine Ezz, whose shows are broadcast on the Saudi government-owned MBC Masr, stalwartly hit back the following day, attacking Sobhi and stressing that Big Time’s role was restricted to co-financing the production.
They also underlined the fact that the film was co-produced by Synergy, which continues to operate under the guidance of the ruling Egyptian regime.
But this reality has flown over the minds of the film’s disgruntled Egyptian critics, who chose instead to point the blame at the Saudi backers.
It is highly unlikely that the Saudis had any creative say in the making of the film. The hostile Egyptian reception was, above all, an emotional reaction toward Sheikh, who has attracted the ire of the nation for multiple reasons.
They include purchasing the Egyptian football club Pyramids and transforming it into a major contender to Al Ahly and Zamalek; insulting Sobhi and punishing another actor for coming to his defence; announcing that the lucrative Riyadh Season would no longer be solely reliant on Egyptian talent; insisting to stage the Riyadh Season in its full lavishness shortly after 7 October, 2023; and his alleged secret marriage to singer Amal Maher.
Sheikh is commonly referred to in Egypt as "Al Shewal", the money bag that treats Egyptian talent as products casually traded and discarded.
The Egyptian reaction toward El Sett is reflective of a nation with no confidence in a regime whose calamitous economic policies have led to an overreliance on generous donors like Saudi Arabia for a lifeline.
Lest we forget, it was the Sisi government that handed the sovereignty of the Egyptian islands Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi Arabia at the beginning of its reign in 2016.
Egyptians rejected El Sett not because it is a bad film - the local box office is routinely topped by critically mauled pictures, after all.
Similar to the aggressive reception that met Netflix’s 2023 Cleopatra series, which cast a Black actress as the Ptolemaic queen, Egyptians have little left to cling to but their grandiose history.
Hamed and Mourad may have attempted to present a more grounded portrait of Umm Kulthum, to unearth the woman behind the myth.
But there is little to this woman beyond failed romances and business shrewdness - a fact that may have further enraged an audience already on edge about Saudi influence that is becoming increasingly unwelcome.
El Sett premiered in Europe this week at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
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