Dhuha Abdul Raouf Al-Mulla

The feeling of rationality is enhanced in the novel "Autumn Quail" (Al-Samman wal-Kharif) by the novelist Naguib Mahfouz, which was directed for the cinema by the director "Hussam El-Din Mustafa" and starring Mahmoud Morsi, Nadia Lutfi, Abdullah Ghaith, Adel Adham and Mimi Chakib. The novel revolves around the life of "Isa Al-Dabbagh" who belongs to parties that fluctuate and stumble during the British presence in Egypt and after it. He is the rational man closely associated aristocratically with the second catery of officials who later try to exclude him to leave him without a job, which enhances the feeling of hostility and violence towards those around him, even his fiancée who left him after his bankruptcy or after his property was confiscated and he was excluded from the job he was working in under the formula of purification. We witness decomposition in behavior where the character of (Riri) appears before him, played by the actress (Nadia Lutfi). This incomplete relationship with the official dismissed from his post and the call girl leads to many conflicts based on the important role played by the social conditions that prevailed in Egypt then.

Between the historical narration and the literary narration, the drama placed us in front of a reversed romanticism in the personality of the hero and his cousin, according to the aesthetic purpose and the content based on a political period of Egypt's history. Naguib Mahfouz did not shy away from it, but left it boiling, even if the characters were stems from the imagination of an author who lived through many social and political periods and studied philosophy and Western narrative literature from (Balzac) to (Zola). We feel that the point Mahfouz addresses, whether in the novel in a literary form or in the movie dramatically, represents an important turning point in the life of "Isa Al-Dabbagh", the one dismissed from his job, and unable to build a social relationship with the surroundings after the reality that made him far from aristocracy.

The social background is strongly linked in that period to the social and political changes that Egypt went through during the period of writing the novel and producing the movie, through which "Isa Al-Dabbagh" tries to restore life with its changes that imposed themselves on him even with the existence of a daughter from Riri. The search for life is the human quest for which man struggles. The death of the mother is the beginning of the son's life who deduced from the events of his life that he was in a state of neglect, especially as the ideas formed in an era changed by the act of Riri, the woman who was liberated from behavioral constraints, each representing real questions that the author cared about metaphysically and with details shortened by the drama, while the writer expanded them in the novel as he was in moments of realizing the value of the characters he addressed, which represent in their repercussions the ideas adopted in a stage, cancelling themselves automatically before the will of life and its completion as it should be, even if the concepts between the acceptable and the rejected were liberated, meaning rejected today accepted tomorrow and vice versa. Does coexistence between contradictory worlds make us explore the truth, imagination, lying and honesty without exceeding our narrow life limits, which we consider from ethics, virtue and satisfaction with destiny?

The non-belonging and the sense of isolation and loneliness and the emergency crisis on the existence of the non-belonging and his sense of non-existence or his sense of the power of the mistakes he committed is the life of "Isa Al-Dabbagh" in the novel "Autumn Quail". Nevertheless, the director treated it in the movie with a symbolic vision in many parts trying to put the viewer in front of the image of the stubborn man who rejects the advice of his mother, his friend and his cousin, although he is not a traitor, he fought alongside those who stood in the face of the occupier at some point. However, the future returns with its weight to stand in front of him through his daughter whose mother he rejected before she resorted to the old man who married her and gave her his name, so that his daughter exists in life under a name other than that of her stubborn and overbearing father, who was humbled by life and given a kind of ability to accept life changes to complete them as they should be, within satisfaction with destiny. Does life remain in a state of stagnation or does it resemble the human and his convictions in its changes?

Human meaning surrounds the story of "Autumn Quail" and removes injustice and oppression from every scene through which Mahmoud Morsi was able to embody the role of "Isa Al-Dabbagh", who evolves despite his fixed convictions that are not subject to renewal. Thus the visual dramatic balance is disturbed and the internal dramatic balance remains for the character played by Mahmoud Morsi with strong dramatic influences. Nadia Lutfi was also able, despite this, to play the role of a call girl and then her commitment to the love she fell into even though she was in her cinematic beginnings, where the expressive power is physically and vocally, i.e. movement and meaning, in her sentences charged with feminine emotion and the strength of her understanding of the role she played. So can the movie "Autumn Quail" be described as another cinematic material through a story written by Naguib Mahfouz according to the human existential philosophy?