What is really disturbing is how Chahine winds Qinawi’s violent lust into everyday sexuality.
Qinawi spends his days at Cairo’s Central Station, selling newspapers, but most of all watching the women that surround him, whether passing through on journey’s, pose in stockings for newspaper advertisements, or, like him, making their living at the station. Qinawi is in particular Hanuma (Hind Rostom), the drink seller, who is already engaged for Farid Chawki (played by the actor of the same name), and who laughs off all of Qinawi’s ineffectual advances. As the summer heat bears down on Central Station, Qinawi’s infatuation boils over into a dangerous obsession.

I’ve never seen a more genuine, nor sobering portrayal of lust. We watch Qinawi as he watches erotic dramas unfold that he will never be included in, as he paws over newspapers freshly saturated with erotic Western imagery and pastes them on the wooden walls of his pathetic shack. We also watch him watching others, station workers lusting after and gently harrassing women as they pass.

What makes the film unique, for its heritage anyway, is the occasional attention Chahine gives to the women who are the object of his and others’ lust, women who live their lives constantly buffeted by the desires of men which reach out initially from the watching eye.

Chahine takes this everyday activity, watching, desiring, lusting, and shows how easily this spills over into violence. We not only see the women he desires, but we see the intensity of his longing growing until it completely consumes him and he is only a violent hunger barely contained by a thin membrane of skin and basic sociability.

But it is not just looking which is the problem, rather it is the lack of reciprocity, the looking without looking back. When Qinawi’s fantasy – of marrying Hanuma, building her a house by the sea, giving her children – is about to be punctured forever as she readies herself for marriage he decides to murder her. This fantasy is doomed to failure because it is impervious to the desires of Hanuma. It exists in spite of what she desires, not because of it. Its failure only feeds anger into Qinawi’s succession of lascivious fantasies.

This eventually drives him mad and in the film’s conclusion he is straightjacketed and sent to an asylum moments before he would succeed in marrying Hanuma. But what is really disturbing is that Chahine sets his madness on a continuum that begins with the desires of ordinary men. For what sets him apart from the other men gathered at this nexus of human interaction? The men around him are able, ocassionaly at least, to satisfy their desire. Qinawi, with his broken body, pride and masculinity can not. Otherwise they are not that far apart.

Qinawi’s violence began in his desiring eye. Chahine ventures that looking, an activity at central to the way men express desire – all men, not just sadistic lunatics – in fact commingles with violence and hatred and for this reason, Bab el Hadid makes for uneasy viewing.

Mediocre cellist Daigo Kobayashi quits his musical career and moves back to the countryside of his youth along with his wife. With no other options, Kobayashi takes up work as an ‘Encoffineer’, a job that takes in both practical and ceremonial measures to repare bodies for the afterlife. Surprising himself (though not any half-intelligent audience) his new line of work becomes the catalyst for Kobayashi’s emotional transformation. By preparing others to move beyond life, Kobayashi gains the strength to face the traumas that are holding back his own.

Nicholas Barber in The Independent, for example, said ‘this heartfelt, unpretentious, slyly funny Japanese film is worth waiting for’ and it took the award for Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards (although that means nothing to me) and a host of others.

Its not that what people say is wholly untrue. It is witty and at times quite touching. And Takeshi Hameda’s cinematography brings a sincerity and stillness that is a perfect frame for Departures’ moments of genuine, simple humour.

But at other moments Departures risks crossing over into sentimentality, even schmaltz. What really got on my nerves, though, was the character of Kobayashi’s wife who was not much more than a prop, skin deep, without the conflicts and desires that humanise a character. Perhaps the Japanese masters of electronics have invented smiling, sympathetic robots to accompany sensitive men on their emotional journeys.

These superficialities prevent Departures from approaching the cinematic meditations on death of a master like Akira Kurosawa, films like Ikiru or his finale Adadayo.

Despite the hype, Departures just isn’t that good.