The Square

I'm normally not a fan of documentaries like The Square, which attempt to explain complex political situations through the eyes of a few supposedly representative individuals. The result is often wildly oversimplified, and the audience leaves with the false impression that they've attained some meaningful insight. But the talented Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim (Startup.com, Control Room) has fashioned something infinitely more impressive than the typical reductive snapshot.  The Square documents the recent political turmoil in Egypt, using footage from local camera crews and personal video shot by the documentary's subjects. The film begins with images from the 2011 Arab Spring protests when an amalgamation of nonviolent protestors from many socioeconomic and religious backgrounds occupied Cairo's Tahrir Square and demanded the overthrow of then-President Hosni Mubarak. This event launched an ongoing struggle in Egypt, but the film does not spend much time dwelling on this single event. Instead, this opening segment introduces us to the movie's three main characters, each with their own different political perspective but all united in a desire to bring freedom to their country. Ahmed Hassan is a young, passionate activist devoted to convincing his fellow Egyptians to join the struggle in one-on-one interactions and speeches he makes to small groups in the street. Khalid Abdalla is a British-Egyptian actor who starred in The Kite Runner and uses his celebrity and elegant English-speaking voice to articulate ideas to the larger Western world. Magdy Ashour, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood wants Mubarak gone but understands why the others in the movement continue to protest after the Brotherhood takes over. As the events of the protests unfold, Nouajim follows these three men as well as dozens of other characters, imparting to the viewer a broad understanding of the array of people who make up a revolution: true believers, opportunists, irrational fanatics, potential leaders, and casual bandwagon-riders. We experience the difficulty of keeping a political movement both idealistically pure and practically effective, and we gain a rich sense of how protracted uprisings really are. Just as the American Revolution did not end with the famous shot heard 'round the world, the Egyptian Revolution only began with the overthrow of Mubarak.

It's difficult for any film to present a complete portrait of a society undergoing radical change, and perhaps it's an impossible task for one as short as this, with a running time of only 108 minutes. But while The Square fails to provide much information beyond what we've seen in the news over the last three years, it achieves something much more important. Nouajim's film fosters a complete day-to-day, year-to-year understanding of exactly what a revolution consists of. Most documentaries about political movements either tell their story by looking back on past events or convey only individual accounts with moment-to-moment immediacy. The first type of film often presents the end result of a political struggle as a foregone conclusion, making it difficult to grasp the complex difficulties the revolutionaries confront tangibly. The second kind gives us a more personal, emotional understanding but often lacks the diverse perspectives necessary for the audience to come away with a complete sense of everything at issue. Noujaim deftly threads this needle, giving us the palpable sense of what the revolution means to the characters we've gotten to know, but also constantly pulling us back to the distant vantage point from which we, as non-Egyptians, experience these events. More than any recent political film I've seen, The Square reveals the nature of political revolutions: rather than single incidents that cause a seismic change, they're small cyclical progressions, which may slowly add up to a dramatic metamorphosis but could just as easily amount to nothing, with the society right back to where it was before.