Trapped

The immediate chaos of the 2011 Egyptian revolution is used as a backdrop for a collage of stories about women who find themselves stuck in places they wish they weren't in Manal Khaled's directorial debut. The stories offer a multifaceted look at women from different backgrounds, although each is quite slight and tends towards the soapy, while the nature of each woman being confined in some way also leads the film to feel rather airless and stagey, despite its obvious good intentions.

There's a sweetness to some of the tales, not least that of little Farah (Fareh Maged), who has been left home alone by her single mum (Neam Mohsen), who has had to go to her work in a hospital in order to pick up her pay packet. We see how the little girl commits her own tiny acts of rebellion, taking down her hair and, later, talking to the woman (Reem Hegab) who has found herself accidentally locked in the stair by Farah's mum. There's a gentle sense of solidarity between the two of them that is echoed elsewhere, as each vignette sees women discovering unlikely allies.

Certainly the woman (Sara'a Jebel), who finds herself fleeing the protests into a mobile phone shop, doesn't expect to encounter much solace, but through the course of a night she finds the owner (Osama Abo El Ata) may share more in common with her than she originally thought. The tension of the film is also at its best here, as police make their presence felt, with Khaled wisely keeping their faces out of the frame here and elsewhere so that a more general sense of patriarchal threat is generated, rather than bad acts simply being attributed to a single person.

Rounding out the trio of stories is the tale of a pair of women - each from different walks of life - who after attending the protests find themselves coralled by a group of abusive police, into a bathhouse. There, amid the collision of different classes and perspectives, a certain sanctuary and common ground will be found. Although some of the smaller details are nicely worked, particularly the exchanges between Farah and her unexpected "guest", the stories are, in general, too slight to hold up against the weight of the melodramatic-leaning dialogue Rasha Azab gives them. There's also something unsatisfying about the way the film drifts from one incident to the next, not just in the sense of things lacking closure but in the way it makes the film feel disjointed. Strong sentiments struggle to be matched by its shaky structure.