Egyptian writer-director Ahmad Abdalla burst onto the scene in 2009 with Heliopolis and, one year later, Microphone, two films with a freshness and youthful energy that felt like a revitalized force in the nation’s industry. After the Revolution his work took an understandably darker tone, especially his finest film, Rags & Tatters, but he seemed to have stumbled a bit in subsequent productions until his newest title, 19B. With a slim narrative and a straightforward approach, Abdalla is more in control here, using the story of an old porter in an abandoned Cairene mansion to comment on class, the dignity of work, and the changing social fabric of the city. Though an abrupt attempt to turn the film’s villain into a potentially sympathetic figure has no basis for plausibility, this handsomely produced, effective drama will likely find welcoming festival berths and a modest international life on streaming sites.
The film’s protagonist (Sayed Ragheb) isn’t given a name: he’s one of Cairo’s vast number of bawabs, or building guards/doormen, whose faces everyone knows but are never asked their names. He’s been the guard at the Villa Labib for decades, when it was an airy, spacious mansion inhabited by a wealthy Egyptian family. However when we see the once grand Villa, it’s become one of the city’s innumerable abandoned properties, a decrepit shell with cracked, decaying walls, dirty floors, no furniture, and a back façade so unstable it needs support beams to prevent it all from collapsing. Rats periodically gnaw on the wiring, a family of cats inhabit the first floor, and stray dogs roam the sad garden. The guard is the sole human inhabitant, living in the servant’s room next to the kitchen and regularly reconnecting the wires which in any event carry pirated electricity from a neighboring building.
The Labib family moved out years ago, like so many wealthy Egyptians, and the heirs haven’t been heard from in ages. For twenty years not even the estate’s lawyer has bothered to check on things, though the guard still gets his monthly low paycheck, which is just enough to cover his very modest requirements. While his friend, the neighboring bawab Sukkar (Magdy Atwan) dresses in a traditional galabia, which marks him as belonging to the peasant class, the guard has his pyjamas for night and morning, and a shirt and trousers for the daytime: though he lives in a small corner of the mansion, his bearing is that of someone who’s been in intimate contact with the upper class. He has his routine: caring for the animals, walking through the villa’s large rooms to make sure nothing has disintegrated, and keeping the outside world, just beyond the wooden gates, at bay.
The villa is his nest, which he protects zealously, but it would be wrong to say he’s completely isolated from the world around him since his daughter Yara (Nahed El Sebai) visits regularly, he has daily gabs with Sukkar, and a neighboring doctor (Fadwa Abed) who shares the guard’s love for animals brings food for the cats and dogs in a large KFC bucket. But the mansion and the past world it represents is his, so to speak, so he looks with fury at the rough parking attendants on the street, whose loud hip-hop music, harsh language and wheeler-dealer ways are the antithesis of the gentility that once marked the neighborhood.
Then Nasr (Ahmed Khaled Saleh), the main parking attendant, bullies the guard into letting him store contraband cartons of alcohol and cigarettes in one of the rooms, and subsequently strongarms him into accepting money as rent to sleep there. Nasr is initially seen as the dark side of the city’s street life, an ex-con who deals in illegal merchandise and threatens the guard with exposing him to the municipal authorities for pirating electricity. When Yara learns that Nasr has moved in, she gives him an ultimatum in one of the film’s most powerful scenes: she has a difficult marriage and is overworked, but she’s retained a sense of propriety learned from growing up in the villa, and refuses to feel threatened by Nasr’s malevolent hold.
19B plays skillfully with the tensions between the classes, especially the proletariat anxiety between those who retain a notion of “betterment” and those whose hard lives have trapped them in a dog-eat-dog mindset. Abdalla also has a canny notion of others on the street, such as the doctor whose warmth and friendliness towards the guard (whose name she probably doesn’t even know) guides her behavior less than her solicitousness towards the stray cats and dogs. The guard feels increasingly trapped between these realms, squeezed on one side by Nasr, and on the other abandoned by his former employers and their milieu; as the world he so carefully protected for decades shrivels up, his pent-up frustrations – with himself as well as the outside world – force his rage to bubble over.
Abdalla’s main script misstep derives from an over-generosity to his characters: not wanting to make Nasr a simple villain, he overturns expectations with a scene meant to show the character’s bullying as the result of circumstance. While very well-played by Saleh, the monologue comes from left field and goes against everything we know about this person – in a bid to make him three-dimensional, he instead seems unevenly conceived. El Sebai brings a solid, intelligent earthiness to her role as Yara, and Ragab inhabits the guard so well it feels as if the actor has donned this persona many times before.
Rising cinematographer Mostafa El Kashef has beautiful command of the villa’s spaces, privileging natural light at all times and capturing the marked qualities dividing the mansion’s interiors and immediate surroundings from the chaotic world outside. Sara Abdallah’s editing likewise is attentive to the differing rhythms, and art director Amgad Naguib ensures the Villa Labib is familiar in a palimpsestic way, encrusted with age and memories of a lost world.
Director: Ahmad Abdalla
Screenplay: Ahmad Abdalla
Cast: Sayed Ragab, Ahmed Khaled Saleh, Nahed El Sebai, Fadwa Abed, Magdy Atwan, Maher Khamis
Producers: Mohamed Hefzy, Jessica Khoury
Executive producer: Yara Goubran
Cinematography: Mostafa El Kashef
Production designer: Amgad Naguib
Costume designer: Nahed Nasrallah
Editing: Sara Abdallah
Music: Youssef Sadek
Sound: Alaa Atef, Mohamed Salah
Production company: Film Clinic, in association with Shahid
Venue: Cairo Film Festival (International competition)
In Arabic
95 minutes
