Like Nour El-Cherif, Ahmed Zaki first gained a reputation on television. He masterfully played the role of Taha Hussein, the “dean of Arabic literature,” in al-Ayyam (The Book of Days (1979). However, the most socially revolutionary character Zaki played on TV was in the feature film Ana La Akzheb Wa Lakkini Atagammal (I Don’t Lie, I Embellish Myself), just before he moved on to movie stardom. In this special feature, Zaki perfectly embodies the schizophrenia prevailing in Egypt in a time when society was shifting from bureaucratic socialism to unregulated capitalism. At the university, his character is a brilliant, handsome man who draws the admiration of a young woman from high society; at home, he is a gravedigger in a poor popular neighborhood next to a cemetery, where he lives and dresses like any sub-proletarian. From this character on, the new type represented by Zaki was that of a young man crushed by the capitalist machine, disoriented because he is accustomed to a welfare state that distributes diplomas as well as jobs to its young university population.
The character he played from film to film allowed him to put a face on Egypt’s youth, who were striving against the devaluation of university diplomas and the reign of the nouveaux riches produced by the wild liberalization implemented by Sadat. At the same time, this generation was struggling with the upheavals of social values, due to the sudden shift from a state-oriented economy to an “open” economy (the policy of infitah, as Sadat called it), an economy that was deregulated with the state’s benediction. Alternatively, Zaki played the young man without a diploma or education who carved his own place in society to the best of his abilities, earning his living through the lucrative non-qualified professions in the Egypt of the 1970s and 1980s, such as driver, hairdresser, etc.
But unlike some other neorealist characters, Zaki’s were almost never anti-heroes. He was always the champion of the underprivileged. In Mohamed Khan’s A Bird on the Road, he plays a simple driver who challenges the authority of a rich and jealous husband who mistreats his own wife. As a hairdresser in Mu‘awwid ‘ala al-‘Asha’ (Date and Dinner, 1981), also by Khan, he again challenges a rich man and supports this man’s wife against all odds.
It was only in the late 1980s, when neorealism lost its momentum as a form of political and social critique, that Zaki played figures belonging to the dominant classes. The shift took place within neorealist cinema, in Mohammad Khan’s masterpiece, Zawjat Rajul Muhimm (The Wife of an Important Man, 1988). In that film, the champion of the poor is a woman, the wife of a ruthless policeman working in the state security department; she dares to oppose her violent husband and leave him, after he exceeds all limits in his professional and personal dealings with everyone around him. Ahmed Zaki plays the Sadatian megalomaniac policeman who firmly believes that, in the character’s own words, “officers rule the world.” Although a seminal critique of police brutality and state control under Sadat, and certainly a realistic expression of the socio-political situation of the time, this film represents a turning point in Ahmed Zaki’s career, in that it inaugurated a period in which the star made increasingly institutionalized choices in his roles. More and more, these roles tended to represent figures of power (one of the few exceptions was when he played, again in a Khan film, the marginal street-fighter hero in 1993’s Mr. Karate).
Playing Icons
Toward the end of the 20th century, Egyptian cinema and TV increasingly tended to produce nostalgic biographies of modern cultural and political icons. The “revival” attitude seems to be the ultimate resource for a cultural modernity unable to renew its energy, as it deals with the frenzy of constant upheavals in late global capitalism. Television productions revived Viceroy Ismail Pasha, father of modern urban Cairo, in Bawabat al-Halawani (The Halawani Gate, 1996); Umm Kulthoum, the legendary diva, in a series bearing her name (2000); and Hoda Sharawi (2005), the first “feminist” in Arab history. During the same period, cinema produced three major biographies, of presidents Nasser and Sadat and of singer Abdel Halim Hafez, all featuring Ahmad Zaki.
The last ten years of Zaki’s life saw much gossip about his supposed megalomania, allegedly the key motive for his impersonation—and occasional identification with—Gamal Abdel Nasser in Nasser 56 (1996), by Mohamed Fadel, Anwar Sadat in Mohamed Khan’s Ayyam al-Sadat (The Days of Sadat, 2001) and Abdel Halim Hafez in a film still in postproduction. The gossip is a typical example of the blurred boundaries between actor and character, but it is also proof that Zaki had reached the status of both an excellent actor and a popular star. It also illustrates the importance of a star in a cinema industry: Ahmed Zaki bears no physical resemblance to Nasser or to Hafez. Nevertheless, these grandiose projects could never have been produced if the leading role were not played by a living legend like Zaki.
In the last years of the 20th century, the star of neorealism became the product of an industry that strongly relies on stardom. The credibility of his interpretation of a character was not founded on the resemblance between the actor and the historical character he impersonated. Rather, it was based on economic feasibility: securing a star like Ahmed Zaki for a film is enough to guarantee success, even if conditions of mimetic realism are lacking. Credibility in the films in which Zaki plays Nasser or Hafez was based on one rationale: only a great actor (and star) can represent a major historical figure.
When he played the roles of great men, Ahmed Zaki proved more than once that he was a high-profile actor with an incomparable talent as an imitator. In the role of Nasser, Zaki proved to be extremely meticulous about the tiniest attitudes and gestures, to the extent that no film critic felt it was necessary to mention the obvious absence of physical resemblance between “al-Ra’is” and the star. Sharing the same large popularity seemed to fill any gap in resemblance between both men. The same could be said of Zaki’s interpretation of Sadat, to whom he bore a closer physical resemblance—one could even say that Zaki was more dignified than the real Sadat. This gave the character an aura consistent with the image of a historical leader, although the original historical figure’s manner was sometimes more comical than grave.
In any case, Ahmed Zaki achieved what many leaders have failed to do: he was unanimously acclaimed. He succeeded in the tour de force of playing with equal grace the two antinomic figures of modern Arab history: Nasser and Sadat. Each leader’s supporters are always in extreme opposition, but agree when it comes to recognizing the excellence of Zaki’s impersonation of Nasser and Sadat. His death following a long and painful disease—which reminds the audience of the last months in the life of Abdel Halim Hafez—has lent more pathos to the memory of Ahmed Zaki, and possibly secured immortality for this star, who passed away just after playing the character of Hafez, the emblematic figure of Arab romantic nationalism. Ahmed Zaki has not only joined the pantheon of Arab film stars but also reached, with the three leading figures of Arab cultures he impersonated, the status of an immortal.
Footnotes:
1. Edgar Morin, Les stars (Paris: Seuil, 1972).
2. Walter Armbrust, “Farid Shauqi: Tough Guy, Family Man, Cinema Star,” in Imagined Masculinities (London: Saqi Books, 2000), 199–226.
3. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).
4. Some critics and historians consider the first neorealist Egyptian film to be Sawak al-Utubis; to others, this same trend, which they prefer to call New Egyptian Cinema, was inaugurated by Ahl al-Qima. Both films were produced in 1981. Cf. Ibrahim El Ariss, “Les enfants de Salah Abou Seif et de Coca Cola,” in Les cinémas arabes, CinémAction (Paris: Cerf, 1987); Samir Farid, al-Waqa’iyya al-Jadida fi al-Cinema al-Misriya (Neorealism in Egyptian Cinema) (Cairo: GEBO, 1992); and film critiques by Rafiq al-Sabbane in the Cairo weekly Al-Ahram Hebdo.
5. In the realm of Egyptian pop music, a similar phenomenon is observed in the 1980s. The outstanding rise of an artist born in the Nubian south, Mohamed Mounir, could be explained by the same reasons.
