Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day?: An audio-visual poem about love and Eros

The Forum section of the Berlinale (10-20 February 2022) is one of the best places where to find new examples of experimental cinema from all over the world.

Sometimes, these are not the most impressive ones, but if you are patient enough, you might find some true gems. Luckily enough, this is the case of a very intriguing title, namely Mohammad Shawky Hassan’s debut feature Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day? – a co-production between Egypt, Lebanon and Germany.

"Overall, the film is both light-hearted and poetic. There is room for irony but also for some thoughts about what love means to people – and how different and surprising these definitions can be"

Before working on this film, the Cairo-born helmer directed some shorts including It Was Related to Me (2011), On a Day Like Today (2012) and And on a Different Note (2015), the latter showcased in the Berlinale’s Forum Expanded programme and later acquired as part of the MoMA’s permanent exhibition.

Shawky Hassan’s first feature can be defined as an audio-visual poem about love and eros, loosely inspired by the verses of William Shakespeare’s titular Sonnet 18.

One detail will immediately strike the viewers: during the opening credits, we find out that subtitles will be displayed in four different colours – yellow for classical Arabic dialogues, white for colloquial Arabic, orange for excerpts from film clips and pink for song lyrics.

It’s an apt choice as it helps foreign spectators who are not familiar with the Arabic-speaking countries’ cultures to distinguish the different “sources” used throughout. It also reflects the polyphonic nature of this work, unique of its kind and aesthetically fresh.

But what does Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day? focus on? Despite the lack of a linear narrative, we realise that a female narrator – a sort of One Thousand and One Nights’ Scheherazade played by Egyptian thespian Donia Massoud – wishes to tell the story of a love between two men.

Nevertheless, the film rapidly develops into the tale of a polyamorous chorus of lovers talking about their own life experiences – sometimes through vague hints, but most often with thorough descriptions while challenging each other with provocative questions.

In particular, Shawky Hassan’s direction and writing constantly play with the boundaries between love as a sublime emotional state and the instinctive brutality of pure eros. This wide scope gives him the freedom to jump from the elegance of a seductive smile to the cheesy lines two people can tell each other before engaging in casual sex.

Overall, the film is both light-hearted and poetic. There is room for irony but also for some thoughts about what love means to people – and how different and surprising these definitions can be.

Mixing high-brow and low-brow cultures and twisting pop clichés as well as heteronormative expectations, Shawky Hassan tells the ups and downs of polyamorous love, including its moments of pure joy and great suffering.

His approach to characters is hybrid and metafictional: in some instances, the actors are clearly playing their parts and staging the events; in some others, they look like subjects taking part in controlled interviews for a documentary.

In addition, the lack of a traditional plot and the unconventional themes allow the director to experiment more freely, adding to the film brief animated sequences boasting psychedelic colours, streams of consciousness, sung dialogues and monologues and distorted perspectives.

Male bodies take centre stage – at times filmed elusively, at times carefully and extensively – and it couldn’t be otherwise for a poem of this kind. The only solution that is perhaps too radical concerns black screens. Their use is sporadic and is clearly intended to strengthen the words pronounced by the characters as well as the song lyrics, but it also represents a risk factor when it comes to keeping the viewers hooked.

Thanks to a careful work on a complex soundscape (courtesy of Kinda Hassan and Tsvetelina Valkova), visually stunning cinematography lensed by Carlos Vasquez and an excellent work on pacing enhanced by Carine Doumit’s skilful editing, the experience is pleasant to the eye and highly atmospheric.

Its deliberate lack of narrative linearity, its colour palette and the exploration of human bodies recall – at least in part – that of Selim Mourad’s Agate Mousse, a beautiful Lebanese feature that played at Rotterdam last year. Mourad is also portraying one of the lead characters in this film, but we can’t make assumptions about the weight of his creative inputs as he is not officially credited in any other role.

Its strong experimental nature might make the distribution of Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day? to a wide audience is a difficult task. Hopefully, Shawky Hassan’s latest effort will breakthrough within the rich arthouse and queer-themed festival scene.

Davide Abbatescianni is an Italian Film Critic and Journalist based in Cork, Ireland. 

Follow him on Twitter: @dabbatescianni