There are films that advance with stealthy steps, as if they were afraid of waking up the ghosts they summon.
My Father's Scent: A Haunting Portrait of a Father-Son Relationship
The film My Father's Scent, the first feature film by Egyptian director Mahamed Siam, is one of those films. A nocturnal, almost stifling film that unfolds in the shadow of a house in Alexandria and in the folds of a father-son relationship, gnawed by unspoken words, the brutality of words, and the impossibility of loving otherwise than clumsily.
After six months in a coma, Omar, the father, returns home as if he were returning from a journey without a story. The illness is there, massive, but treated with a strange nonchalance, as if the awakening of a body that has brushed against death were just one more detail in an already worn-out existence. This return, almost banal in its staging, acts nonetheless as an intimate explosion. For this night will be the first real encounter between a father and his younger son, Farouk... and the last. A night during which all tenderness will be distilled into a bottle of cologne.
A Tense, Theatrical Drama
Mohamed Siam builds his film like a tense, theatrical drama. The camera struggles to move, observes, frames, and imprisons. It clings to the walls of the old house, its narrow corridors, its rooms charged with memories and resentments. The space becomes mental, affective, almost carceral. The staging prioritizes restraint, precision, refusing any spectacular effect. Here, violence does not explode: it seeps.
Light as a Central Character
Light is one of the central characters of the film. A drowned, misty, filtered light, filtered by the rain that falls relentlessly over Alexandria. The image often seems to float in a state of visual indecision, as if Farouk's own gaze were blurred, sometimes by tears, sometimes by fatigue, drugs, or the impossibility of seeing his father otherwise than as a crushing figure. The reflections of the city on the windshield, the diffraction of nocturnal lights in the raindrops, compose an inner landscape where everything seems blurred, uncertain, painful. An aesthetic of erasure, of suffocation, which translates the need for purification as much as the impossibility of washing away the past.
Remarkable Performances
The acting is remarkably accurate. Kamel El Basha portrays a rough, sometimes cruel father, a prisoner of a patriarchy that he embodies as much as he is a victim of it. His meanness is frontal, brutal, but never gratuitous: it always lets a poorly formulated love, a distorted attachment, transpire through authority and pride. Opposite him, Ahmed Malek delivers a heartbreaking performance. His son Farouk is inhabited, like a modern-day Hamlet, by a simmering anger, a deceptive nonchalance, behind which hides an abyssal lack, a hindered tenderness, and an immense thirst for recognition. Their confrontation is a duel of silences and deadly phrases, where each word seems to carry the weight of years of misunderstandings. The cruelty of the exchanges never erases the possibility of love. On the contrary, it reveals its tragic depth.
A Film About Toxic Masculinity
My Father's Scent speaks of this masculine inability to express affection, of this toxic virility that prefers domination to dialogue, hardness to vulnerability. The illness, the coma, the proximity of death are treated without pathos, almost with indifference, as if life itself had lost its exceptional character. Waking up after six months of absence becomes a non-event, an absurd continuity of a already fractured daily life.
A Film That Seeks Understanding
By rewinding the hours that precede the father's death, the film does not seek suspense but understanding. It advances by successive touches, by tiny revelations, leaving the spectator to recompose the affective history of this broken family. The scenario prefers to delve into the complexity of emotions, with bitter irony and profound melancholy.
A Question That Lingers
It poses, in filigree, this vertiginous question: if we all had the right to a last night with those we have lost, would we choose to settle our scores... or dare to love at last? A dense, restrained, profoundly human film, which Mohamed Siam dedicates "to all fathers" — and, perhaps above all, to all sons who are still searching for words.
