" Dunia" (" Kiss me not on the Eyes" ), Lebanese writer-director Jocelyne Saab' s first Egyptian feature, caused a minor scandal after its Middle East premier at the Cairo Film Festival earlier this month. A week later, this sensuous, loose-limbed film closed its 2005 tour at the Dubai International Film Festival. The surroundings were more amicable but the criticisms remained.

Seen outside the confines of Egypt, " Dunia" lingers in the memory as a visually striking, politically daring film and a monument to Saab' s determination and ingenuity. That doesn' t mean it will appeal to all tastes, of course.

At the center of the plot is Dunia herself (Hanan Turk), a twentysomething woman whose inquisitive, strong-willed, conflicted character has been nurtured in a significantly man-less nuclear family.

First among these strong women is Dunia' s aunt (Aida Riad), who drives a taxi and lives in splendid sensuality with her husband. Complementing this earthiness is the intellectual role model of Dunia' s former literature professor (Sawsan Badr).

On the margins of the plot - and the center of the film' s controversy - are Dunia' s niece and her grandmother. The most distasteful character in the film, the grandmother is the enemy of all things sensual and schemes to have the little girl castrated to nip her nascent sexuality in the bud.

Dunia embodies aspects of all these influences and the film has her navigate through several inchoate desires - intellectual, spiritual, political, social, sexual. The plot diffuses to follow developments in these different facets of her life.

Passionately interested in Sufi poetry, Dunia approaches the charismatic professor Beshir (pop star Mohamed Mounir) to advise her on her final paper at university. He takes her on, and the two commence a high-minded flirtation, spending long hours discussing variations on a theme of physical and spiritual love and union.

Adding to Beshir' s stature is his vocal defense of free speech. After several brave condemnations of those who would presume to repress Egyptian intellectual and artistic liberty, he is one night assaulted by thugs. The attack robs him of his vision, significantly enough, and from this point forward he seldom leaves his rooms. Never fully dressed, his physical needs seen to by a female assistant, Beshir is reduced to a shadow, as it were, of his former self.

Dunia' s mother was a renowned belly dancer, and the daughter shares a passion for dance. At about the same time that she approaches Beshir, Dunia enters a prestigious dance competition - rather unconventionally since she refuses to actually dance during the try-out, which should send up flares to the audience that the script is not-altogether realistic.

The jury accepts her submission and, perhaps aware that not-dancing won' t actually win the competition, Dunia begins to train with her mother' s former dance instructor (film choreographer Walid Aouni).

The third man in Dunia' s life is her boyfriend Mamdouh (Fathy Abdel-Wahab), a fellow university student and, as we eventually discover, a burgeoning architect. Sweet-natured, if unable to commit to a serious relationship, he' s as horny as a dog but keeps their relations chaste - though the thuggish shabaab in Dunia' s building imagine otherwise.

Dunia eventually decides to marry Mamdouh. She wears a paper wedding gown and later - when he overbearingly demands that she withdraw from the dance competition because he doesn' t want all the men in the world to have their eyes on her body - its fabric provides the medium for her declaration of independence from him.

Dunia has mounting difficulty reconciling the triptych of stories arising from her overlapping passions. Her marriage is never consummated, but she loathes the abnegation of sensuality represented by her cousin' s cliterodectomy.

Ultimately Dunia is only able to consummate her disparate passions by integrating them - presaging the return of Beshir' s vision, significantly enough. Much of this business is expressed in metaphorical terms. We never witness Dunia' s competition, for instance, but the film closes with an extended shot of the actress dancing, barefoot and outdoors, in public but with no public audience in evidence.

It' s an appropriate way to close the film since it captures Saab' s major accomplishment - shared with her director of photography Jacques Bouquin and editor Claude Reznik - making a film shot in digital video look as if it were shot in 35mm film.

" It was impossible to shoot in 35mm," said Saab after the Dubai screening, " so we used the DV as if it were a 35mm camera - the same composition, the same trailing shots and so on. They thought I was mad, and the actors were often very uncomfortable with it at first."

When she arrived in Dubai, Saab was still reeling from Cairo, where the post-screening news conference was reduced to a screaming match between her and Khaireya al-Beshlawy, her unusually critical moderator.

Quite apart from her struggles with the Egyptian censors, she said, and an uncooperative press and industry, Saab faced several artistic challenges in making " Dunia."

The first was the script itself, which took five years to research and write. Though the story is completely her own, Saab says she had several Egyptian collaborators.

" I' m very precise in my work," she said, " and I wanted to be authentic in portraying Cairenes' day-to-day lives. Their way of living, their dialect is quite different from Lebanese. I also needed to research Sufi poetry.

" Albert Faraj helped me a lot with the male characters. The film isn' t about these women finding that the men in their lives are bastards. These men are all experiencing crises, struggling against convention. Neither the dance instructor nor the poetry professor is a typical male character."

Mainstream critics dislike " Dunia" because it doesn' t have a tightly-integrated, linear plot. Rather, it has a cast of characters and a central situation from which spin several sub-plots.

Saab' s screenplay is more concerned with showing than telling, a storytelling approach usually preferred to more didactic ones. Saab' s cinematic language is often more allusive than direct, though, and this, combined with the loose plotting, will test the patience of some audiences.

" The structure of the story is based on ' A Thousand and One Nights,' " said Saab. " ' Dunia' isn' t the sort of film to watch with your head. You follow your feelings.

" It' s a great challenge not being able to be direct. It' s hell to film a love scene when the actors are forbidden to touch, when they can' t kiss."

As Saab is a Lebanese filmmaker, " Dunia" may seem evidence of a recent opening-up of the Egyptian film industry. This was best exemplified by last year' s bouquet of first-time features - such as Hala Khalil' s " Best Times" and Oussama Fawzi' s " I Love Cinema."

Saab doesn' t see any evidence of Egyptian cinema opening. " I have one country," she said, " my imagination ... but I fought my way into Egypt. The door wasn' t opened for me.

" It' s not changing because the producers and distributors don' t want any change. It comes down to money. They want to invest at the beginning of the year and have it come back by the end. It does, thanks to the Egyptian poor, people who can afford to pay for the cinema three or four times a year.

" Anyway Lebanese are no strangers to Egyptian cinema. If you back to the 1940s, the Lebanese were among the pioneers of Egyptian film -  Youssef Chahine, for instance."

Saab pauses when asked if her being Lebanese had anything to do with the difficulties she faced in Egypt.

" I think 65 percent of the reason we had this trouble comes from the content - the female castration, the lovemaking." She paused again. " About 35 percent was because I' m Lebanese. Part of this is the fact that I' m a woman."

(source : terra.net.lb)

Sortie française prévue Juin 2006. Avant-première le 3 Avril à l'Espace Cardin, 3 Avenue Gabriel, 75008 PARIS