The Yacoubian Building

Marwan Hamed's version of the bestselling novel by Alaa Al Aswany is a portmanteau account of a handful of characters living in an apartment building in Cairo in 1990, just before the first Iraq war: the story is garrulous, unreflective stuff, much like a TV soap opera, and the interweaving narrative strands give us a broad sketch of a cosmopolitan Egyptian capital uneasily poised between the present and the past, and between Islam and the west, particularly Francophone Europe. The film's view of gay male sexuality is dated and shallow, but it is watchable, seems far shorter than its three-hour running time, and boasts a splendid central performance from Adel Imam.