‘El Sett’ review: Reverential, heavy-handed biopic of Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum

Dir. Marwan Hamed. Egypt/Saudi Arabia. 2025. 155mins

El Sett – that means merely ‘The Girl’ – is an acceptable title for the biopic of a legendary singer. Umm Kulthum (1904-1975) was the grandest Egyptian grande dame since Cleopatra;  a legendary singer and an icon each in Egypt and within the wider Arab world, she comes throughout in Marwan Hamed’s busy, reverential movie as a cross between Edith Piaf, Aretha Franklin and Maria Callas. Certainly, the latter hailed her voice, as have Bob Dylan, Robert Plant and different Western admirers.

Solely intermittently provides us the character behind the legend

Hamed’s movie actually conveys the standing of a girl dubbed ‘Star of the Orient’ and ‘the Fourth Pyramid’, however solely intermittently provides us the character behind the legend, whereas lavish, typically cluttered interval evocation takes the main focus away from a voice we barely get to correctly respect. Premiering in Marrakech earlier than heading to Rotterdam – the place it options in a retrospective of director Hamed – El Sett could also be too ungainly to click on cinephile bins, however ought to rating with mainstream Arabic-speaking audiences wherever its topic’s legend nonetheless resounds.

Director Hamed is greatest recognized internationally for expansive 2006 novel adaptation The Yacoubian Constructing, which efficiently melded realism and melodrama. However right here, the melodrama overwhelms the perception, feeling generic quite than absolutely emotive. Altogether a luxurious manufacturing, the movie is commonly heavy-handed and distractingly busy in its interval evocation, and the enhancing – typically interpolating archive footage each actual and pastiche – might be needlessly agitated.

The movie zigzags via the singer’s life, begining in 1967 with a prestigious live performance at Paris’s fabled L’Olympia, the place Umm Kulthum may be very acutely aware of representing her nation within the wake of its struggle with Israel. This over-extended, abruptly curtailed sequence establishes her glory quite over-insistently, as adoring punters clarify to digicam that they’ve come from all over the world to see a dwelling legend; all through the movie, photographs of followers in states of rapture hammer the message dwelling.

El Sett then jumps again to the singer’s childhood. Hailing from a poor household within the rural Nile Delta, she would journey together with her father, village imam Sheikh Beltagi (Sayed Ragab), to sing at weddings – one in all which erupts into violent mayhem as two households feud. Within the Twenties, as a younger lady (Mona Zaki), she involves Cairo on the behest of a expertise agent, though her father insists that she solely sing devotional songs; her conventional repertoire, in addition to her male gown and headdress, brings resistance, even derision, from cosmopolitan audiences. It’s when a pasha’s daughter provides her an impromptu make-over and a stylish gown to put on that the elegantly august picture of ‘El Sett’ begins to gel.

Hamed continues to skip via key episodes in her biography, alternating between color and black and white, together with Umm Kulthum’s assembly with poet Ahmed Rami (Mohamed Farag), composer of a few of her best successes; and the second when musician Mohamed El Kasagbi (Tamer Nabil) pulls a gun in protest in opposition to the chance that she would possibly abandon singing. There are additionally glimpses of her romantic life, notably a dalliance with a dapper affiliate of King Farouk, finally quashed by a disapproving Queen Mom. The singer goes on to be revered in post-Revolution Egypt, adored by President Nasser. All through, she proves an imperious, autonomous determine who calls the photographs each in her music (“I don’t sing gentle or cheerful songs,” she frostily declares) and her enterprise dealings.

There are additionally moments of personal agony – in center age, alone in her mansion, she lives in anxious isolation. The movie discreetly, if not coyly, provides some sense of her romantic facet: when she and her statesman admirer go to the Pyramids, she directs sly, realizing seems at him as he confesses a few earlier love. General, Egyptian star Mona Zaki, just lately in Flight 404, struggles to deliver out the character behind the picture, not least as a result of for a lot of the movie, she is misplaced behind mask-like make-up and stately, usually stiff manner.

What’s lacking above all is a way of the voice that Callas known as “incomparable”. We hear solely fragmentary performances, typically slathered in orchestral accompaniment; Hamed significantly misses a trick in letting that voice soar uncumbered, within the intimacy it deserves.