Thoughts on Cairo Station

     On Criterion, I watched the 1958 Egyptian film Cairo Station, directed by Youssef Chahine, co-written by Abdel Hai Adib and Mohamed Abu Youssef, and starring Chahine as Qinawi, a peddler with a limp who works selling newspapers in the train station of Cairo, Egypt, eking out a living while being mocked by everyone for his disability and timid demeanor. He is obsessed with Hanuma (Hind Rostom), an attractive and vivacious woman who sells cold soft drinks with her fellow women in the station, and is brash and outspoken, and often sneaks selling drinks on the trains themselves. She is engaged to Abu Siri (Farid Shawqi), who is a luggage porter and trying to unionize his co-workers for better pay and more rights. He unfortunately is abusive to Hanuma, trying to forbid her to work and beats her when he catches her having a party on a train while selling soft drinks.

    When Qinawi does profess his love to Hanuma, she laughs at him and rejects him because he is poor and cannot support himself, let alone her, and his obsession turns more maniacal, getting ugly in a more misogynistic kind of way. As one Letterboxd review by sydney read, "Once again women are the casualities of the incel vs. markists war." The film takes more of a thriller direction, whereas before it was more about working-class merchants in the train station, and I more preferred the neorealism, slice of life feeling to the film, in seeing a depiction of life in Cairo in the 1950s, then the darker turn that the film went towards in its second half.

    Qinawi is initially depicted as a sympathetic hero, but I couldn't feel bad for him and his obsession with not getting to have the popular woman because too many women have been injured or died due to a man feeling "slighted" by them. I understand that he can be seen as an "antihero," but I, likely more because I am a woman, felt more sympathy for Hanuma and her friends in the station. I do appreciate that the film was tackling tough subjects like unionizing of the underclass, gender-based violence, and combining film noir and neorealism, and it is a standout film that depicted a development of a more modern Egypt following the 1952 overthrow of the Egyptian monarchy.

    Hind Rostom as Hanuma is stunning and a lot of fun to watch in this film. She had this lively sensuality that made her "pop" on the screen, and was compared to screen icons like Marilyn Monroe and Anna Magnani. I liked how modern she felt in talking back to men and being outspoken and funny, and she just commanded the screen. She retired in 1979, passed away in 2011 at age 81, and in 2018, Google honored her with a Google Doodle.