‘El Sett’ Review – A Cliff Notes Biography that is Actually an Autobiography

In 1967, Egypt (and other Arab nations) was defeated by Israel in “The Six-Day War”. All Arabs were broken and shocked by that defeat, for the defeat itself and what it revealed to them about themselves and their leaders. Um Kalthoum, by then Egypt’s most important singer, a legend so big that she was already being called “The Planet of the East”, that peasants would travel hundreds of miles just to hear her sing, that all Egyptians would unite around the radio listening to her concerts like Americans did with David Letterman, decided to boost the morale of the people, and collect money for the Egyptian military.

The plan? A nationwide tour that then extended to various nations in the Middle East, culminating in a historic concert at Paris’ L’Olympia. (The film combines footage from this period into one concert for simplicity and grandeur.) The audience was truly international and passionate: rows of people in front of the theatre, calls for her name like a military march or a battle cry, and political protesters calling for a Free Palestine, with international, European, and Jewish audiences present.

Perhaps there was no better way to open a film about Um Kalthoum, it's a strong, hype-inducing introduction for a legend at the height of her national and international relevance. The only possible opening for a film produced by Turki Al-Sheikh (The Man behind “Riyadh Season”) and Tamer Morsy (The Man behind every Egyptian propaganda show and film post 2014), written by Ahmed Murad (who just wrote the script for the opening ceremony for the Grand Egyptian Museum), scored by Hesham Nazih (The 2-time-MCU composer, who in Egypt became the default composer for anything “grand”, from movie blockbusters to political events) and directed by Marwan Hamed (Basically Middle East’s James Cameron or Nolan).

This is the only way this group of people would have opened such a film, and it's an opening sequence of biblical proportions that works as a love letter to an artistic legend.

But also, it's the same opening that recent popular retellings of her story used, like the very popular El-Daheeh’s episode (Think of El-Daheeh like Egypt's kurzgesagt or Vsauce), an episode that was based on the book “Um Kalthoum and the years of war effort” by Karim Gamal, a book that also had the L'Olympia concerts as its opening. (Last year the two concerts were adapted into a French graphic novel, “Oum Kalthoum, The Secret weapon of Nasser” by Martine Lagardette and Farid Boudjellal)

Moreover, it's a tired opening to musical biopics in general that “Walk Hard” made fun of in 2007.

The following two and a half hours are… A lot to talk about and dissect, a barrage of non-linear narrative and plot threads that made many people call the film “unfocused” and “disjointed”. But before responding to that claim, let's talk about the style.

The film is non-linear, jumping between B&W and color for less of a structural reason, but for an emotional or impressionistic reason. A scene could chronologically happen between two colored scenes and be placed in the edit between two colored scenes, but still be B&W for aesthetic reasons, or rather, B&W seems to be reserved for Um Kalthoum in her most iconic, or her most lonely, but that too isn't a rule of thumb. Trying to apply any “Oppenheimer-like” structural logic to the film (even when Oppenheimer feels like a reference point) will leave you baffled.

The film's narrative and emotional structure resemble more the rhythms and structures of a song or a symphony, shifting between the highs and lows like a highly efficient and dazzling rollercoaster, but once the ride is over you feel like the film hasn't covered that much ground, and that all that was the tip of the iceberg. It feels like a 20-minute El-Daheeh script inflated by Baz Luhrmann to 2 and a half hours.

The director, Marwan Hamed, seems to be very comfortable with writer Ahmed Mourad's skeletal and paper-thin scripts. Mourad, a photographer before becoming a writer, measures narrative and psychological depth by what can be visually (and obviously) shown or said directly in dialogue. (Um Kalthoum’s perseverance in the face of hardships is reflected in the obvious metaphor of her singing in the middle of a literal storm.) Mourad’s writing becomes a very comfortable playground for a director as extravagant and hyper-focused on visuals and spectacle as Hamed. Their collaborative projects have gradually evolved into a “style is substance” approach that is not very palatable to some Egyptian audiences and critics.

Ahmed Hafez’s editing (he is also Egypt’s defacto editor for blockbusters) is made of tens of reaction shots, audience members on different levels of ecstasy and euphoria, one reaction shot in particular by “Ahmed Khaled Saleh” reminded me of Anna Karina crying at a movie theatre in “Vivre Sa Vie”. All that is good, but the whole film feels like it suffers a severe case of ADHD, perhaps that is to simulate Um Kalthoum’s layered and textured musical landscapes, but she used to sing Hour long songs that are patient, accumulative, and built to a meditative state, and the film’s frantic pace (and Hesham Nazih’s Hollywoodized soundtrack) seem antithetical to her artistic vision in the first place.

It's unclear to me whether the film is trying to introduce Um Kalthoum to a new Gen Z audience, or to bander to old fans, but either ways it becomes a sort of “Greatest Hits” collection of her most popular moments, playing (and sampling in the soundtrack) her most popular motifs that are known even to those who aren't fans of her (Imagine a Radiohead Biopic that plays “Creep” four or five times during its runtime, or simply the film “Bohemian Rhapsody”)

And now to the big one, the question of “Why?”, why did the film tell this story in THIS way? Why did it choose THOSE events from a big and prolific life? All of the film’s choices, the timeline, the events it decides to include, all of its artistic choices baffling or brilliant, all the historical inaccuracies or fabrications, the artistic liberties, all serve THREE objectives or themes:

A) Focus on Um Kalthoum’s relationship to being a woman:

“El Sett” means “The Woman”, and Egyptians called her “El Sett” as if she is the only woman, the greatest woman, the definition and the exception to Womanhood. She is every Egyptian’s mother and lover, a moving Oedipus complex. And to get more Freudian, the film places great attention on the fact that when Um Kalthoum was a child, her sheikh father made her wear men’s clothes (women were shunned for singing), and tries to unpack how this warped gender representation would affect someone's self-concept of femininity.

That is interesting. Showing that her fan mail became so invasive that her audiences started criticizing her fiancee and treating her like she is theirs, that is also interesting. But most of the film's take on gender is turning Um Kalthoum into a “girl boss”, a strong and ruthless woman that rejects love for success, gives a speech about her succeeding despite being a woman, pays a lot of money to co-found a newspaper so she can be the first woman to write opinion articles, smokes a lot, and treats her band strictly.

The historical accuracy or not is not my point here, but Hamed and Murad's unsubtle approaches make the film’s feminism very basic and Hollywoodish. But I still have to admit that focusing on the feminist and empowering aspect of Um Kalthoum’s rise is an interesting approach to make her more relevant to younger generations.

One example of the film's intent being unclear, or clashing with the execution, is the character of her father, Sheikh Beltagi. The film treats him as her hero, and his loss as her biggest loss, even comparing her falling down during the second L’Olympia concert to other concerts where she faced violence but had him to protect her, and saying she still sees him in the audience for every concert of hers. However, everyone I talked to about the film thought the film showed him in a bad light, as someone who exploited his own daughter. The film's handling of gender and feminism demands him to be the bad guy, he made her wear men's clothes and her breaking free from them is treating as an impowering transformation, also her rise as an independent woman must be by disregarding and standing up to him.

B) Try to Humanize a legend:

That was the reason behind the film's controversial choice to cast Mona Zaki as Um Kalthoum, Mona is one of Egypt's most celebrated and most violently attacked actors, but she looks nothing like Um Kalthoum. The rationale was that they needed a strong character actor to act out the human elements of the characters, for the resemblance to be solved by tons of make-up and suspension of disbelief.

Zaki was heavily made fun of when the trailer released, making fun of her accent and her make-up, and a lot of conservatives took it as an opportunity to smear her personally as a “revenge” for a daring role in the Netflix Arab remake of “Perfect Strangers”. What happened to her is cruel and harsh, but also very fitting for a film that shows how audiences can overstep their boundaries with female celebrities.

Zaki does what she can with what she is given, she is a very fine actor who gives a strong performance. The make-up can work if you surrender to its rhythm and to Hamed’s hypnotizing and distorting filmmaking. However, the film thinks the illusion is much more perfect that it really is, using a lot of close-ups of her face and mouth while singing, and using a lot of archival footage that distractingly remind you how the real Um Kalthoum looked and talked. Moreover, the film doesn't have that much emotional depth, insightful humanity and nuance in the first place to cast such a fine actor who doesn't look like her. They could have gone with a mediocre lookalike who could sing and saved themselves all that work and saved that great actor that public witch-hunt.

All of the film's main objectives (A, B, and the incoming C) have a common thread, they are all about objectification and deobjectification, turning a human being into a “Legend” is as much an objectification as dressing a young girl in men’s clothes.

However, there's a clash between A and B, a delicate dance I don't think the film managed to pull. “A” wants Um Kalthoum to be a God, an extraordinary person who rose against all odds to become an icon, but “B” wants Um Kalthoum to be human. The film becomes an exercise in construction and deconstruction, inflating and deflating. Perhaps the two paths intersect in one point, the argument that Um Kalthoum herself sacrificed the human to become the legend, that she herself suppressed the human to not be seen as human. The film’s grandiose, fast pacing and barrage of emotional reaction shots to her singing also buries the human under the icon.

C) Um Kalthoum's political influence (How El Set is not a biography, but an Autobiography)

Um Kalthoum narratives that start with the L’Olympia concerts always do so to spotlight her political influence, after all, this whole tour was to collect money for the military. Moreover, Um Kalthoum has always been a political figure, being close to the Royal Family before the 1952 Coup d'etat, who then became close to the Nasser military regime, she was so integral to Egypt’s identity that her voice became a political tool, motivating soldiers and supporting regimes.

Furthermore, the film's focus on Um Kalthoum's political rule also works with its Feminist goals, She is a woman who influenced a nation and stood up to herself against political turmoil , the film's tagline is literally “The Voice they could not silence”, instances of violence in her life are also played up and focused on to show that theme of resistance.

But Finally, I have a theory about this film, one I have been building to and dancing around this whole review, so hear me out:

The film's biggest historical inaccuracy is also the film's most dramatically interesting chapter, the years 1952/1953. In the film, after the Royal regime fell, and The Free Officers Movement took over, Um Kalthoum, who sang praises for the bygone regime, was banned from the radio for a year, didn't make any concerts, and stayed at home in crippling, terrifying loneliness, until 1952 when she got a call from Nasser ordering a concert.

It's the film's most vulnerable and emotionally effective sequence, the B&W cinematography turning this vast empty house with an old woman in the middle of it into an almost Lynchian nightmare.

In reality, 1- Her ban from the radio took less than a week, not approved by Nasser, who revoked it once he knew about it. 2- Um Kalthoum never did concerts in the summer (the coup took place in July), her tour always started in December each year, and yes she had concerts in December 1952 3- She didn't even live alone as the film says.

You could call that sensationalism, simplification, or “This is only INSPIRED by real events”, but I do believe some version of those events happened, just not to Um Kalthoum herself.

You see, writer Ahmed Murad was also a man of two regimes, he was the personal photographer for President Mubarak for 10 years, he talked once about the disconnect between following the man around for meetings and conferences in the morning, then hearing people badmouthing him at night in the streets. Then the 2011 revolution happened, and Murad was cleverly neutral, not revealing anything from his experience as a personal presidential photographer. He then managed to get near to President ElSisi’s regime, he was mandated to write the script for the opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum, and was ordered by the President ElSisi himself to become an honorary Senate Member. And even though Murad is never publicly political, his works (even during him working for Mubarak) were political.

The film's director, Marwan Hamed, is the son of screenwriter Waheed Hamid, a renowned screenwriter who used his relations inside the Mubarak regime to pass some of Egypt's most daring and politically charged films.

All Biographies are ultimately autobiographies, your choice for a famous person to make a biography could say more about you than the celebrity himself. Murad and Hamed’s retelling of Um Kalthoum’s life is such a “cliff notes”, “greatest hits” affair, the gender politics so rudimentary, the writing so influenced by modern retellings, because this is a film only wearing the skin of an Um Kalthoum biography, to talk about an artist’s relationship to power in general.

Ultimately, under all the celebration for an icon, all the bells and whistles, “El Set” is a story of power and control, even gender is an element of the power play at the center of it. Family members, Fans, Lovers, Haters, Voters, politicians, Royals, Officers and the public are all in a dance of control around one woman. A woman in a sea of men trying to negotiate some control.

It's worth noting that due to the film's non-linear structure, we see the 1953 section AFTER we know that Nasser himself will be by her side, and will personally care for her well-being, and after seeing the Royal Family’s Sherif Sabry Pasha promise her marriage only to leave her. Um Kalthoum literally says in a scene that she built a wall she thought would protect her but didn't. In that sense, it's an acknowledgement that being close to power isn't true protection, even if you are a senate member, a high-profile director, son of a high-profile writer, the defacto composer for every important political event, they won't protect you, they will leave you alone. Cause you see, regimes always fall and end, but only legends become immortal.