Mohammad Shawky Hassan | بشتقلك ساعات Bashtaalak sa'at (Shall I Compare You to a Summer's Day?) / 2022

the alternatives

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mohammad Shawky Hassan (screenwriter and director) بشتقلك ساعات Bashtaalak sa'at (Shall I Compare You to a Summer's Day?) / 2022

 

This Egyptian, Lebanese, and German co-production is like no Arab gay feature film ever before made.  Indeed, there are very few movies like it in the Western world. A musical based on random selections from Shakespeare and Scheherazade, with heavy doses of camp humor thrown in just for fun, Hassan’s film explores through live action, animation, and music video-style sequences, as well scenes of rather explicit sex, various inter-male gay relationships, particularly the problem of love in open, polysexual relationships.

     There appears to be, at first, a kind of narrative continuity to the work. As critic Susanne Gottlieb points out in her comments about the Berlinale 2022 showing:

 

“Separated by inserts into several sections, only one of which carries the famous opening line of the sonnet, the film is a merry-go-round involving one simple idea. Two men meet in a club or a bar: one of them is Egyptian, the other hails from Latin America. The attraction is instant, and sexual intercourse follows soon after. After their lovemaking in between the late hours of the night and early dawn, as is befitting of a Shakespearean tale, they start talking about their love lives. One of them has led a rather polyamorous life, while the other is still only discovering himself. A future in which both commit to each other, in which they don’t drag their own damaged lives into this bond, seems impossible.

     This is as far as the comprehensible part of the plot goes.”

    What follows are songs in Arabic, sketches revolving around mythical depictions of sexual situations, interviews with different gay men, drag scenes, basic cabaret numbers, and various scenes and tropes that point to gay porno movies and videos (meeting up with a mechanic who doesn’t take credit cards, participating in a gay orgy, doing a photo shoot, etc.) that relate to the thematic issues such as they exist.

     One of the most beautiful stories concerns a merman with who the human swims for several days before the merman, realizing they cannot truly consummate sex, swims off.

 

     If there does, however, seem to be any coherence between this work’s parts, it emanates from the fact that it appears, like the works of the Arabian Nights, that elements are repeated over and again. One central figure continues to demand of the others who love that they accept his open life style or that they join in for polyamorous sex, but the two others continue to find it difficult that they cannot love him alone and so possess him or at least establish some sense of permanence other than the famed single “summer day.”

      At other points the men, from various perspectives, discuss Grindr dates, threesomes, and the rejection they feel of the sexually active figure they so strongly love.

     On one level, there is almost a traditional heteronormative viewpoint expressed, particularly through the personification of Sharazad (Donia Massoud), holding out the normative values of marriage and childhood, and some view of a “happy ending,” which the men’s behavior does not permit, their reactions to the more societal correct view being the subject of both humor and expressions of sorrow.

      But the real delight of this work comes not from its narrative but its bold theatricalism, the constant shifts of performative methods that challenge any coherent possibility of behavior. And we recognize in the work’s very form, accordingly, the multivalent possibilities of the LGBTQ experience. There is no one way to perceive reality, no one way to define sexual satisfaction. The form itself defies the very traditionalism which is repeated as an undercurrent again and again, forcing one of the figures to ask, “I wonder why he keeps telling me stories I already know?”

     The numerous cast members, including Nadim Bahsoun, Hassan Dib, Ahmed Awadalla, Richard Garbriel Gersch, Kenton Türk, Gabriele Marra, Erik Cataldo, Agatino Camarda, Carlos Vasquez, Ronni Maciel, Sergio Abril, Albert Janze, David Townsent, Amr Karkout, Eyad Houssami, and Rashid Oweyele and numerous others represent a multitude of different voices speaking and singing about the issues of gay sex.

      Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Perhaps. But there so many other metaphors to consider that ultimately Shakespeare’s simple “romantic” metaphor almost loses its significance, which given the numerous alternatives to describe love is perhaps not at all a bad thing.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (February 2023)