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For renowned singer-actress Malak (Tunisian singer Latifa), life's suddenly taken a turn for the worse. Her husband has run off with her best friend (who's ugly!), her wealthy mother's trying to set her up with scriptwriter Alphi (Bedir), and her daughter's fallen in love with the chauffeur's son.
Only handsome psychiatrist Lamei (Wafik) seems to offer her any solace. Little does she realise that Lamei's only interested in her so he can fuel his career as a movie star... and get a taste of her inheritance.
In a bid to make Malak see sense, Alphi hatches a plot to expose Lamei's real intentions, turning the real-life drama into a farcical script and appealing to the gigolo's greed by telling him that Malak's daughter is about to inherit the fortune.
Director Youssef Chahine's latest feature is a playful comedy that blends musical, farce, and melodrama into an enjoyably funny hybrid that's like an Egyptian blend of Bollywood and Pedro Almod贸var's relationship comedies.
Punctuating this comedy of errors with a range of song and dance numbers that showcase the talent of Latifa, Chahine lets reality and fiction slide together, so that the film-within-a-film becomes indistinguishable from the drama. In this showbiz world of riches and fame, art and life have merged so succinctly that no one's able to tell them apart any more.
The smart-mouthed characters - the funniest of whom is Malak's aging mother, with her pink-rinsed hair, acidic tongue, and an overwhelming desire to see everyone happily married off before she dies - are matched by Chahine's witty fantasy sequences in which reality gives way to daydreams and (literally) eye-popping revelations of genius.
It's inevitably lighter than some of the director's other work, but you'd be hard pressed not to enjoy its anarchic, screwball spin on the family musical.
In Arabic with English subtitles.
