The Closed Doors

"The Closed Doors" (Al-Abwab Al-Mughlaqa) (1999, Egypt, 110 min.), directed by Atef Hetata. In Arabic with English subtitles.

Free Screening: Friday, February 4, New York City

I definitely believe that the best way to avoid fundamentalism is to be as open as possible and to resolve the fundamental problems of our society.
…
Adolescence is the age where things are lived the most inwardly. The fundamentalists build on this repression.
-- Atef Hetata

By Ginan Rauf

Atef Hetata’s compelling first feature film Closed Doors is a coming of age story set against the backdrop of the Gulf War. Mohammed the young protagonist inhabits a constricted and suffocating world punctuated by possible openings or flights of fantasy.
Mohammed moves through a grim urban landscape of closed doors as it were; every which way he turns, insurmountable obstacles greet him and evoke the cynical theft of a future. School itself is a grim place ruled by the rod and characterized by the assault on the imagination. Corruption reigns supreme there and a veritable industry of private lessons fuels an ‘’educational’’ system narrowly focused on the production of grades rather than the cultivation of educated minds. There is little space in such a setting for the inward or contemplative life and the road to self-knowledge is virtually closed off.

To pay for the luxury of a private lesson Mohammad turns to his “father,” a contractor who exports Egyptian workers to Iraq including his oldest son Saleh. The father has likewise abdicated all responsibility for Mohammed’s education; money is easily diverted from the frivolous pursuit of education and invested in a young bride close to his son’s age. Mocking his son’s ‘’infantile’’ ambitions, the father recommends emigration in what approximates a modern form of slavery and the export of male bodies to oil rich countries. It matters little that Saleh has been drafted into the Iraqi army and that his exact whereabouts are unknown. For Cairo’s urban poor there are no body counts and the state itself is only too eager to export its discounted masses to the Gulf countries as evinced by the many posters plastered all over the city walls.

Mohammed is advised to embrace a form of manhood largely defined in terms of earning power and a concomitant ability to take care of his female kin. The initiation into manhood is merely a pretext for withdrawing love, to withdraw what Erich Fromm describes as an active concern for the young in this case. “Love is an activity: if I love I am in a constant state of active concern with the loved person, but not only with him or her. For I shall become incapable relating myself to the loved person if I am lazy, if I am not in a constant state of awareness, alertness, activity.”1

Mohammad’s mother--played by the award winning actress Sawsan Badr--seems to be the only adult actively engaged in the young boy’s growth. But for Mohammed to pursue his dream is to paradoxically confront his own painful dependence on a single mother struggling against overwhelming odds to salvage vestiges of a far fetched dream; to become a pilot—Captain Hamada as his mother loving calls him—is to delay initiation into adulthood and to compromise his very ability to be the “man” in his mother’s lonely life. After all, she is a domestic worker surrounded by an aura of sexual exploitability; Fatma’s work takes her behind closed doors and the mobility it enjoins is experienced by the young boy as a mockery of his elusive manhood. It generates innuendo just as it places a great burden on the young man to ward off predatory males. Tormented by his intense feelings and forbidden desires, Mohammed seeks refuge from his own demons in the certitude offered by the dogmatic teachings of a local sheikh.

The otherness that lurks within is projected onto an impure world of kufr or disbelief that is to be strenuously combated and closed off from the psyche. Fatma’s evolving relationship with a local teacher is seized upon as one more example of the world’s corruption. Emotions of intense jealousy are tragically conflated with the work shaytan or devil, closing the boy off from all feelings of compassion and active concern for a single mother desperately seeking fulfillment through love. Only the Sheikh has unambiguous answers for the confused adolescent who is promised a young bride (read initiation into the world of marriage and manhood) in exchange for placing his mother in a polygamous marriage to another Sheikh (read control of female sexuality and the descent into fitna or chaos). He is even given a nominal job selling religious paraphernalia in front of the mosque (read achieving manhood through earning power).

The mosque, then, becomes a parallel space for providing questionable answers to intense identity conflicts as Hetata notes in an interview. Fatma is momentarily re-assured that some good may come of this interaction and that perhaps constitutes the limitations of her awareness, the constraints of her economic circumstances. While the Sheikh may be attentive to Mohammed’s needs and frustrations, he is hardly attuned to the boy’s growth or actively concerned with the fulfillment of his dreams. Instead of dealing with the infantile fixation on the mother, there is a repression of self-understanding that undermines the possibility of future growth; here too Mohammad has reached a dead end or closed doors. The mother becomes even less accessible as a human being with sexual needs and autonomous desires just as they boy remains alienated from his deepest psychic wounds.

Yet it would be simplistic to imagine that Atef Hetata’s Closed Doors is merely a one- sided indictment of the fundamentalists; the film also points to other collective failures: namely the abysmal failure of the educational system, the not so benign neglect of the state and of secular political organization as the late Edward Said might have put it. Therein lies the importance of Hetata’s probing and opening of closed doors.

1- Fromm, Erich, The Art of Loving ( New York: Harper and Row, 1989), pp. 118