User Reviews

Sometimes context can enrich a movie watching experience. In the case of the Egyptian movie After the Battle, context is everything. It's everything to the extent that the movie, its characters its events and its cinematography are all dependent on knowing about a place in time. Additionally the clear and broad emotions therein, the anger, the disappointment, the resentments all comes boiling over in this film with the fervor of a witch's cauldron. After the Battle is not a good movie but it is a decent snapshot.

The film takes place during the Arab Spring – specifically between the events of the February Tahrir Square protests in Cairo, Egypt and the Maspero television building protests along the Nile on October 9, 2011. To democratically minded Egyptians, the summer of 2011 was a time of possibility. The secular forces that initially sparked the Egyptian Revolution were eager to run their own candidates in the first free and fair elections Egypt had ever had. But to laymen like horseman Mahmoud (Samra), the revolution has only given him hardship and thrown his community into chaos and confusion.

Earlier that year, Mahmoud and his fellow horsemen attacked the protesters at Tahir Square to, in his own words "protect their livelihood." After the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak, the rest of the horsemen have stayed quiet and apolitical. But because Mahmoud had fallen off his horse and gotten his face on TV, the rest of his community has ostracized him and his family. Thus Mahmoud is forced to depend on a modern-thinking divorcée and passionate young turk named Reem (Shalabi) to get him and his family out of the rut they're in.

The film is a feral mix of On the Waterfront (1954)-type melodrama and Danton (1983) level political posturing, with a little bit of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) mixed in for effect. It goes about as good as you'd expect from a film that lends the tale a cinema verite intimacy that pays more attention to arms flapping about than real emotional payoffs. What's more, the movie touches on many fault lines in Egyptian culture and the body politic but never develops any of them beyond being window dressing. Thus the melodrama intensifies and intensifies without bringing any new dimensions to the story.

As the film intensifies, the believability of the characters diminishes to the point of everyone looking like stock-types. Mahmoud is a simpleton in need of political awakening. Reem never internalizes her own hypocrisy and instead becomes a do-gooder nuisance. There's the feckless crony capitalist, the besmirched wife, the ambivalent working-stiff – heck if Maxim Gorky gave this script a look he'd throw it out as a work of amateurism; socialist realism – more like socialist soap.

Yet one can't help but imbue After the Battle with the slightest bit of value despite its faults. The film was released in its native Egypt in the fall of 2012, just after the ascension of the Muslim Brotherhood backed Mohamed Morsi as President. Within the span of its production, After the Battle saw the idealism and socio-economic flux of the post-revolution era morph into something ugly, something intolerant and ultimately something undemocratic.

Thus when I say After the Battle is a decent snapshot, I mean that it captures the simplistic zeal of the revolution while unknowingly (though their treatment of Mahmoud) pointing towards it failures to address the problems of the everyday Egyptians. It's almost by default that this film ends up being the best movie of its type since Memories of a Mexican (1950). That still doesn't mean it's worthy of a recommendation though historians may have to take note for the sake of recording the whims of the moment.

A poorly made C-movies for tourists who heed a crash course about the Egyptian revolution, and have no time to look it up in youtube.

The film is too long and all that it offers is several mainstream superficial pop-politics, for people who have absolutely no idea about what happens anywhere else rather than where they live.

It's just another try of selling the revolution and make money out of it, without even trying to make an OK movie while doing that.

Any armature filmmaker or even someone with a mobile phone camera could with some effort do something quite better than that. I just felt insulted.

The film focuses on the lives of three characters: Reem, Mahmoud and Fatma. Reem being the upper class politically active idealist tries to help Mahmoud and Fatma, the couple from Nazlet Semman who are a suffering from the economic problems after the revolution.

I might have had some difficulty understanding the motives of the characters, specially Reem who is very complicated. Fatma's character was the most annoying, the actress' performance was very weak. Honestly i expected a lot more from Yousry Nasrallah because i couldn't get over the melodramatic scenes and the over the top acting. But i kind of understand the difficulty of making a film about revolution that is not finished yet.. must have been very confusing for the filmmakers who refused to give up on the project but their confusion and struggle was showing through the characters. I gave "After the battle" an 8 because it had one of the most poetic film endings i have ever seen.

"After the Battle" is a very fine state-of-the-nation movie, the nation here being Egypt and the time, the present. This film, which has many scenes of documentary-like realism, could have been ripped from the headlines and, in a way, it was. It is a superb piece of political cinema, particularly to us in the West whose grasp on Egyptian politics may be tenuous at best but director Yousry Nasrallah coats his picture in the guise of a love story of sorts between a brusque horseman, coaxed into supporting the Mubarak regime with the promise of work, and a radical young divorcée who comes to support him and his family and it's a strategy that works.

These are people from very different backgrounds and with very different ideas on how Egypt should be governed, particularly in relation to the role of women. Their meeting will have a major impact on both their lives and in unexpected ways. Of course, this romantic, human side to the story makes the film much more accessible to a wider audience. As the horseman and the woman who seeks to educate him both Bassem Samra and Menna Shalabi are excellent and there's a lovely performance from Nahed El Sebai as Samra's too trusting wife. Unfortunately after its screening at Cannes the film very much disappeared. Do yourself a favour and seek it out.