A story about cultural tone deafness and failure… which is perhaps more meta than intended.
Mitra (Neda Rahmanian) is an Iranian film director, visiting Egypt to make a film about legendary singer and cultural icon, Oum Kulthum. She casts her star, a non-actor and unassuming school teacher, Ghada (Yasmin Raeis). Mitra has a hard time dealing with one of her truculent actors, Ahmad (Kais Nashif). She is ably assisted by her co-director, Amir (Mehdi Moinzadeh). During the film’s production, Mitra is also contending with her distance from Iran, her own artistry, and the silent ghost of the subject of her biopic.
Looking for Oum Kulthum certainly looks lavish: the production design, lighting, and photography are all technically beautiful, if lacking a distinctive style. The storytelling they service, however, doesn’t at all measure up. In what is ostensibly a character study, the acting from all four main actors is distractingly bad: jittery eyelines, line deliveries with no clear intention, emotive facial expressions which communicate nothing. And the film is already dancing across a minefield, with a (bad) actor lip-syncing to vocals, which attempt to emulate one of the most beloved singers of all time. Not that the performers have much to work with – the writing is terrible on every level: the first-draft dialogue is bad in four different languages; the poorly-paced storytelling is missing important emotional information; characters without arcs; melodrama with zero tension. This is a film about a director trying to make a film about a subject she admits she doesn’t know anything about – yet we then know even less about both the director and her subject by the film’s end.
Mitra just seems self absorbed, irresponsible, entitled, and somehow privileged – and apart from a snide remark or two from other characters about this, it’s unclear whether the film sees her that way, or whether we’re meant to. It’s therefore tempting to see Mitra as the self-insert character of the film’s co-writer and co-director, Shirin Neshat, mainly because of the meandering way the film, like its protagonist, is indulgent, lacks awareness, squanders its opportunity, shirks what is arguably its responsibility, and seems to believe it’s telling a story that it simply isn’t, which culminates with neither any earned statement nor meaningful consequence.
If Looking for Oum Kulthum is based on a real-life experience, it’s unclear what lessons, if any, were taken from it.
I don’t enjoy saying all this about a female director of Middle Eastern heritage, especially since I don’t know about Shirin Neshat, her life, her work, or the circumstances in which this film was made. Yet if I try to focus solely on the text, the questions quickly pile up. Why is Mitra drawn to telling the story of Oum Kulthum? Why is Shirin Neshat telling this story about Mitra? Why does neither the in-movie director nor real-life director seem interested in actually looking for, or learning more about, its namesake? A movie about a director who makes a movie where “cut” is hardly ever called at the end of a take… it’s a neat microcosm of the experience of waiting for the movie to land, to signal when it considers its statement has been made, so that we can then begin to assess what that statement even is.
Each of the two Egyptian lead actors in Mitra’s movie, Ghada and Ahmed, scolds her for telling ignorant (and probably libellous?) non-fan fiction about a real life figure who means a whole lot to an entire culture. At no point does the film actually reflect on this. It certainly never portrays Mitra learning anything about Oum Kulthum, or considering her own ignorance and audacity. Instead, we get drawn out scenes of Mitra experiencing some vague angst, but it’s interiority without insight, it’s inert melodrama. If Mitra goes on a journey, that isn’t communicated in either the performance or the film-making. Mitra’s apparent turning point is when she breaks down after a phone call we don’t hear, about a child we don’t know, who’s in a situation we aren’t told about. And all of this relates to the movie she’s making… how? At the film’s end, Mitra announces what the story (not of the movie she’s making, but of the movie she’s in) was supposed to have been, but at no point does the movie (either one) back her up. Mitra explains that she got “tired” of Oum Kulthum, a statement which feels entirely unearned and is, after all her (and the film’s) meandering, more than a little “let them eat cake”-coded. All we really see of Mitra is a flighty individual with a lacklustre work ethic, no discernable artistic vision, and cultural tone deafness. At no point does Mitra engage with anything beyond the image of Oum Kulthum (literally), even off-screen.
Looking for Oum Kulthum is a joint international production between five countries – none of them Egypt. It’s a movie which invokes a real-life Egyptian artist, but is centred on a fictitious Iranian artist. The film pays lip service to the fact that a non-Egyptian is telling a fiction about a cultural icon about whom she has little-to-no knowledge, yet at no point acknowledges that this is an embarrassing position for a film-maker to be in. Looking for Oum Kulthum isn’t about any of the things TRT says it is: bringing “the diva’s story to the screen”, paying “a small tribute” to the singer, “the way that she broke through all the tough rules”, or the “challenges as a non-Arab making a film about her”. It’s about a director making a disastrous movie which falls apart for reasons that are entirely unclear… are we just being trolled? Is it low key just one or more of the five countries rage-baiting Egypt?
On paper, I’m the target audience for this film: a culturally estranged child of Egyptian expats who understands how important Oum Kulthum is to them, and to a culture that is lost to them through time and geography. As someone who isn’t personally invested in the idea of Oum Kulthum, I was offended – not least by her ‘cameo’ at the film’s end, perhaps the single most indulgent, pretentious, and gratuitous use of the singer in a movie which hasn’t earned it, and which should have sparked an international incident, if not for Egyptian culture, then certainly for cinematic culture.
Given this film’s failure to articulate its protagonist, her struggle, the art she’s supposedly creating, her reasons for making it, and her reasons for torching everything in the end, Looking for Oum Kulthum is so generic and so lacking in insight that it could be about any person anywhere, trying to do anything and failing. It’s a badly directed movie telling a badly written story, about a bad director telling, according to the actors and financiers in the movie-within-the-movie, a sacrilegiously badly written story. Mitra has no business invoking Oum Kulthum; Looking for Oum Kulthum has no business, nor any reason to, either.
Further Viewing
In the hopes of learning more, I watched as much as I could find of Shirin Neshat discussing Looking for Oum Kulthum. One of her many esteemed appearances in Western cultural media outlets is this one from Talks at Google. The discussion is illuminating about both her own cultural exile, and the tension in the film’s awareness about, well, awareness:
I was reminded throughout of Searching for Sugar Man (2012), not because of the similarity of the title, but because of the similarity of its film-makers’ journey of discovery about the musical figure revealing more about the film-makers than the final film suggests they realise: