Defining love in a rapidly changing world is increasingly challenging. We live in times of technological upheaval, with conflicts casting a shadow over daily lives while we emerge from the changes wrought by the pandemic. Through it all, self-development and self-care have taken on renewed importance across different countries and cultures.
This has, in turn, challenged existing notions of what love is and how to express it. While cinema has traditionally portrayed love in rosy hues when two people unite or in melancholic tones when unrequited, the film world is beginning to adapt to the wider shifts around it.
Romantic films were among the first and most established genres, captivating audiences around the world and allowing them to vicariously experience it through the screen.
Some of American cinema's most memorable classics are films like Gone with the Wind and Titanic. For its part, Egyptian cinema portrayed love in a more conservative light with its iconic romantic films like More Precious Than My Life and My Love... Always. In recent years, however, romance has lost its privileged place on the Egyptian big screen. Nowadays, love stories often take a back seat to the main storyline, which typically involves the male protagonist chasing material or social advancement.
Despite this shift, Egyptian cinema produces the occasional romance flick. Targeting younger audiences, they typically lack the classic feel of past films and often feature pop stars and singers in the cast.
Lover
However, one recently released film that stands out is Lover, starring Ahmed Hatem and Asmaa Abulyazeid. Riding on Hatem’s recent success in the TV series Omar Effendi, the film’s title and poster shows Hatem holding Abulyazeid’s hand in the middle of the sea under a cloudy sky, suggesting challenges they would face in their on-screen romance.
Written by Mahmoud Zahran and directed by Amr Salah, Lover breaks with normal conventions by dabbling in the belief of “djinn lover"—a motif of supernatural love between humans and otherworldly beings. The 1985 film Humans and Djinn, starring Adel Imam and Yousra, is one of the few Egyptian horror films that explores this theme.
For its part, Lover invokes a kinship with a different era, bringing a distinctively nuanced perspective to the screen. It also comes with a plot twist—something that has become popular in contemporary Egyptian cinema—which the director sets up from the start by embedding flashbacks from the past within the present-day storyline. This twist transforms the plot from a love story to a horror film, leaving viewers wondering if it even belongs in the romance genre. After all, can it be a love story without tender handholding between two starry-eyed lovers?
The story begins with the two main characters already firmly in love. Malek (Ahmed Hatem), a psychiatrist, is strongly drawn to his patient, Farida, despite several red flags she had revealed during their therapy sessions, including nightmares, hallucinations and prescription drug addiction. He struggles with the ethicality of marrying his patient, weighing its potential cost to his career, but ultimately goes through with it.
Then, the audience is suddenly plunged into Farida's dark world. Her father (Mohsen Mohieddin) is so worried about her that he seeks the help of a sheikh (Samy Maghawry) to free her from what he believes to be a "djinn lover" haunting her.
Like Farida herself, the audience questions whether Malek's love for her is genuine. After all, far fewer people in today's age are ready to sacrifice so much for love. The film delivers the answer to this question through the plot twist where hidden past grudges and a dark yearning for revenge cast a dark shadow over the protagonists' love story. In the end, Lover tells a far more relatable story of love in our modern and increasingly dark world.
The film could have gone in an entirely different direction and explored how the childhood trauma of our past creeps into our present, but it chose to entertain rather than educate. Nonetheless, Abulyazeid delivers a nuanced performance of Farida as a symbolic victim of domestic violence.
It Ends With Us
American cinema, however, continues to churn out romantic films as they are still big money-makers. The recent box office hit It Ends With Us was adapted from Colleen Hoover’s bestselling romance novel, with 4 million copies sold in the US alone. The story follows Lily Bloom, a deeply compassionate florist whose life is upturned by love twice. In the novel, deeper layers of trauma of Bloom's oppressive father and submissive mother are revealed.
It Ends With Us delivers everything a fan of American romance could hope for—intense glances, kisses, and love scenes. Its main character, Ryle, is played by the film’s director, Justin Baldoni. He is a young surgeon who confesses he is not ready for commitment. And so Lily Bloom (Blake Lively) chooses to distance herself from this enticing yet elusive man because she believes, as she tells him, that he is missing out on something beautiful.
This sets off a compelling back-and-forth. Her urge to pull away only intensifies her appeal in his eyes, and he becomes determined to keep her close, driven by his choice to leave his old life behind for her. What makes It Ends with Us unique is its exploration of transgenerational trauma and, like Lover, the lasting impact of a father’s physical violence toward a mother. The focus is squarely on the daughter, Lily, who feels as though she’s stumbled upon a treasure when a successful and wealthy young man falls in love with her.
Yet, both she and the audience are soon reminded that past traumas—if left unresolved—always creep into the present. Viewers leave the movie with a sensible takeaway: love alone is not enough to make a relationship successful.
Like Lover, the soundtrack in It Ends with Us helps establish the romantic ambience between the characters. An autumnal colour palette adds a feeling of intimacy to the story, appealing to fans of the novel. Also like Lover, It Ends With Us comes with a plot twist. Some scenes are purposely left out of the story's chronology, only to be unveiled towards the film's end. This reveal helps viewers fill in the blanks in the couple's relationship, offering a completely different perspective on it.
Another man, Atlas (Brandon Skelnar), abruptly comes back into Lily’s life. He was her first love, and their story is told through a thread of the past that intertwines with the present as if Lily’s subconscious is reconstructing a memory that deeply influences her current reality. Like Lily, Atlas has endured domestic violence and maternal abandonment, and together, as teenagers, they created a secret life as a refuge from their painful pasts, leaving each other with pure memories amid the hardship.
The bond between the young Lily and Atlas (played by Isabella Ferrer and Alex Neustaedter) feels more genuine and beautiful than the adult relationships depicted in the film. Atlas stands as a counterweight not only to Lily’s abusive father but also to her current partner, Ryle, as Atlas is more aware of his emotional scars.
When Lily coincidently runs into Atlas, she is a woman in her thirties opening her first business, a flower shop, almost 20 years after they first met. The reappearance of her first love helps maintain the film’s dreamy quality. Without it, the story could easily have veered into darker territory, reflecting real-life instances where we might be forced to abandon love altogether and return to solitude.
The author of the novel has said It Ends with Us was inspired by her mother’s experience with an abusive husband—a trauma that left an indelible mark on her memory. What is clear from these two films is that new and more nuanced understandings of love in the real world have found their way to the big screen. Love is no longer blind, as the saying goes, nor are the films portraying it.
