“A voice from nature,” Hazem Saghieh tells me, thrusting the air forward with his forearms.
That is the most precise description of her voice. From nature. Like a rushing torrent. Like the sea’s waves, the wind, the rain. Sweeping like a river, like a volcano we have never experienced but can imagine.
And she is all of that. At last, the walls I had naively built between myself and her voice collapsed. I now close my eyes when I listen to her, sway with the sound, my body jolting at the moment the “ah” cracks. My God.
In this total, almost Sufi-like infatuation, I returned to the Umm Kulthum TV series, read Hānat El-Sett by Mohamed Bakri, and began searching through her photographs, stories, and rare recordings. I grew even more astonished by the woman behind that voice. And when I went to see the film El-Sett, I felt the trepidation of someone heading to a romantic date, ready to apologize to her for my old prejudice, and to sit in one of the cinema’s white-and-brown seats as just another of her besotted admirers.
When her voice rang out at the beginning of the film, I sank into my seat, promising myself two and a half hours of pure enjoyment. For a moment, the film did not disappoint. Had it been just another biographical work, it would have left no mark.
What we have here is a cinematic and artistic celebration of the icon and her many eras. The camera mimics the cameras of earlier decades, according to each year portrayed. Colors and framing move across Umm Kulthum’s different periods, saluting that time, its fashions, and its people. The blend of her voice with contemporary music felt like an explanation of El-Sett’s timelessness, her endurance, and the survival of this mythical figure beyond the erosion of time, with her sunglasses, handkerchief, swept-back hair, dresses, and jewelry. An icon.
The second tribute was to multiple cinematic genres, from musical spectacles to Hitchcockian scenes. Mona Zaki delivered the finest performance of her career. The innate intelligence and wit in her eyes. The strength of her character and her awareness of her stature, her hold over the hearts of men and over the Arab nation alike. Unlike Sabreen’s more restrained portrayal in the TV series, the film’s Umm Kulthum is bolder, more candid, and more in control of her surroundings. She appears as the gravitational center of any space she occupies, fully aware of it, while remaining sparing in her emotional expression, which felt convincing.
Mona Zaki did not imitate a single, fixed “Umm Kulthum.” She offered her own vision, or rather the filmmakers’ vision of Umm Kulthum as they wished to present her. El-Sett can carry multiple dramatic interpretations, much like Marilyn Monroe. Long ago, she transcended her real self and opened the door wide to imagination, like Shakespeare’s plays or enduring children’s tales such as Cinderella, which is not reproduced so much as recreated each time anew, retelling the story we know in a new artistic form. Here lies perhaps the film’s intelligence: revisiting key moments of her life without strict adherence to factual precision. The armies of error-hunters are hard to understand. Hundreds of books about her already exist. El-Sett is neither a documentary nor a docudrama. It is cinema that retells stories it knows we already know, and that we enjoy seeing again.
The film, centered on her persona, is packed to the brim with stars whose roles might amount to a single scene, yet their presence enriches the work immeasurably, turning it into a sequence of pleasant surprises.
The final impression the viewer carries out, with her voice still echoing, is Umm Kulthum’s feminism in an era that was not merely patriarchal but under absolute male dominance, where a female singer was just that, while everything else belonged to men. Here we encounter a businesswoman, the first female head of the Musicians’ Syndicate, a columnist, and a national figure who took upon herself not only fundraising during wartime, but also the task of restoring the morale of an entire nation struck at its core by defeat. A feminism that stood as an equal to men in another time. A politicized woman who calculated her moves precisely, fully aware of how high her heel stood, ever since King Farouk learned that his path to Egyptians’ hearts was paved only through her. Ever since Gamal Abdel Nasser realized she was like the pyramids, like the Nile, like the ancient Egyptians’ carvings etched into stone, unrivaled and imperishable. From then on, as men after men fell in love with her, El-Sett knew the power she wielded, the silky scepter she held in her little finger, waving it left and right as heads swayed behind heads behind heads.
In its final reckoning, the film asserts that Umm Kulthum was exactly as described: a planet around which many men revolved. In this particular retelling, they all appear marginal, from Nasser to Ahmed Rami to Mohamed El-Qasabgi to the men she married. She is the origin, the root, the foundation. The film does not wrong her by portraying her negotiating with and outmaneuvering musicians to secure their votes, nor is it a catastrophe that she shouts at members of her band, especially since it is her voice that does the shouting. It neither stripped her of sanctity nor burdened her with forced humanization. It offered a masterful artistic vision for a film that, like her songs, cannot be satisfied in two and a half hours and deserves, at the very least, a second viewing. It is enough that her voice passes through the film, with dimensions that shattered the laws of physics, so that the sound no longer comes merely from nature, as Hazem Saghieh says, but from beyond nature itself.
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