Wingrave (2007)

September 12, 2007

by Nathan Shumate

Written, produced, and directed by Ahmed Khalifa
Starring
- Ashraf Hamdi
- Diana Brauch
- Karim Hegazy

The DVD box for Wingrave proclaims it the first English-language Egyptian feature film. I have no idea what the Egyptian film industry is like; it could be a thriving regional entertainment business, full of gems waiting to be discovered by adventurous Westerners, like its neighbor Turkey. But the fact that this $10,000 microbudget DV production can claim to be the first English-language Egyptian feature film does not say alot. And whatever native-language industry exists probably does not appreciate Wingrave being its international ambassador.

Not that Wingrave is a horrendous movie. I’ve seen movies by no-talents, and Ahmed Khalifa is not a no-talent. But as writer/producer/director/cinematographer/editor/composer (no word on his involvement with catering), he crafted his singular vision without the benefit of perspective, and made a string of creative choices that are, frankly, disastrous. What was meant to be a understated and subtle supernatural chiller turns out boring, uncompelling, and frustrating in its unwillingness to find the dramatic core of any of the situations presented.

Our cast, in its entirety.

The title character, Henry Wingrave (Ashraf Hamdi), is a twenty-something parapsychologist whose involvement links the three distinct (though linked) narratives to follow. We’ll be hearing Hamdi’s voice throughout the movie, but very rarely from his own lips; voiceovers and suchlike are the order of the day.

In the first tale, “Seance,” even that is dispensed with: shot mostly in black and white, this story presents the affectations of a silent film. Wingrave is engaged by Jane (Diana Brauch) and her friend Carl (Karim Hegazy) to help them contact Jane’s deceased brother Bryan, to see if he’s, you know, resting comfortably in the great beyond. There are, Wingrave realizes, tensions abounding in the apartment, and both Jane and Carl are standoffish in explaining any deeper motivation for the contact. (Throughout the movie, “parapsychologist” and “medium” are treated as if they’re two terms for the same job.)

It is better to grab a candle and curse the… Wait, that’s not right…

Now, while I have a great appreciation for silent movies as a distinct art form, the use of the form must be matched to the story so dramatized. Active, visually compelling narratives work very well as silent films; talky dramas, not so much. Imagine watching Twelve Angry Men as a silent film, and you begin to see the limitations of the format. Unfortunately, “Seance” is exactly the wrong story to film as a silent. Three guarded, pensive people sitting in a room, in a story which relies on dialogue and exposition to move forward, means that we often get a twenty- or thirty-second shot of a face with lips moving, followed by a title card filled with text from the top to the bottom of the screen (badly in need of proofreading for punctuation, too). And in the absence of other sound, the only aural component to the story is Khalifa’s synthesized score, a kind of half-hearted dark ambient music which might be adequate as an underscore to an independent “talkie,” but which simply can’t carry the entire aural component of the story.

And I would tell you about the story, but it’s also maddeningly vague. They try twice, plus once more, to contact Bryan, and Khalifa’s sense of visuals is really quite good, especially with the absence of an effects budget. (He sure does love those shots of crooked pictures on the wall.) But after much grimacing and silent wordiness and shocked expressions as something vaguely dark is felt, the story simply… ends. What they were contacting wasn’t Bryan. Oh. Next!

“Stunt double! I need a stunt double!”

The second story, “The Presence,” at least has a voice. Wingrave’s, in fact. Not that he speaks more than a single line; everything else is a voiceover. And this is not just a single-location story, it’s practically a single-actor story; Wingrave arrives at the house of a friend who’s been complaining of a disturbing presence. He stays there alone for the night, which means shot after shot of checking lightbulbs, beaming flashlights into corners, and sitting in morose silence. (In contrast to the last story, whose score was omnipresent, this one is practically unaccompanied for at least the first half.) All the while, Wingrave’s voiceover explains how he’s checking for ectoplasm or discovering that the entity is a “photospectre” which will be weakest at dawn for him to perform an exorcism (or “extraction,” as consistently calls it).

And it’s this far into the movie that I feel justified in floating an assessment: Khalifa is a good visualist. But he cannot figure out how to tell story in or with his images. What we see is largely a string of static tableaus; any narrative that there is has to be relayed in a format divorced from the immediacy of the image — by title cards in “Seance,” or by voiceovers in this one.

LOLgyptians.

And once again, this entire “story” is more a single sequence of setup for a larger story that has to be alluded to off-screen. After a night spent communicating with a malevolence which communicates only in writing, Wingrave leaves in the morning. The voiceover informs us that later he found out that the spirit there was of both a perpetrator and victim of violence, and that it would never leave. The end.

The third story, “Abode,” uses a third different (yet maddenly similar) narrative conceit, that this is actually the text of the book. Again, the action is (mostly) silent, but instead of title cards, third-person omniscient prose and dialogue comes up between shots (or sometimes overlapping on the shots). The impression of bookishness would have been greatly enhanced if the text had not been white letters centered on a black background, and it’s enjoyability similarly improved if it had been proofread, both for punctuation and for simple style. Not that there’s any way to make this particular stylistic affectation work well; it imposes an unnecessary distance between the audience and the narrative, sapping the particular immediacy of cinema; and in a story which seems devoted to understated and muted action, there’s precious little immediacy left to sacrifice.

“Jeez, it’s almost a silent movie! I should be able to remember my lines!”

Oh, the story? Again, something to do with Bryan (or not-Bryan), who may (or may not) be possessing Jane. There’s much muttering about whether a dead person’s voice on an answering machine can be recorded to a second medium, and discussion of how to tell possession from possible mental illness… By the time they brought up symptoms of sleepwalking, I began to wonder if they were describing the performers or the audience.

Bottom line: Khalifa is a decent visualist, and with practice he may even become a good storyteller. But he is not a storycrafter. That’s not a black mark of shame; most of the admired and successful directors, from Alfred Hitchcock to Steven Spielberg to Peter Jackson, have realized their deficiencies at screenwriting and have collaborated with good and specialized writers to shape engaging stories which they could then tell well. Especially in the case of microbudget independent cinema, where production value can’t always be depended upon to carry a movie, the story has to pull a tremendous amount of weight. The alternative is films like this — a bunch of well-composed shots of nothing compelling.