Clash dramatizes a crucial moment in world history in a clever and original way, but ultimately it relies too heavily on pathos and plot conveniences, thereby failing to realize the promise of its premise. Director Mohamed Diab strives to speak about Egyptian society, political identity and the human condition throughout Clash. His efforts, however, fail to leave their mark: there are too many contrivances and sappy scenes for it to come off earnestly. It is all a bit heavy-handed, which is especially unfortunate given the film’s promising second act.
Clash is set entirely within a single day and within a single paddy wagon. The day is historic: the democratic elections held in the wake of the Arab Spring revolt that ousted Hosni Mubarak have just been overturned by a military coup. The streets of Cairo are alive, full of protestors raging against the coup—which removed the fairly-elected but much-maligned Muslim Brotherhood regime—and counter-protestors celebrating the toppling of what they saw as a dangerously anti-democratic Islamist government. The military police, called in to keep order and help consolidate the coup, try to navigate the various factions filling the streets.
The paddy wagon fills up quickly. First come two journalists, arrested for having video recording devices. Next comes a collection of pro-coup counter-protestors, taken into custody for throwing rocks at the journalists who were already in the truck. Obviously, this creates distrust and conflict within the vehicle. A few scenes later, after a skillfully-staged street fight filmed from the perspective of those interred in the paddy wagon, a third set of prisoners is added: Muslim Brotherhood supporters protesting the military’s intervention into politics.
This is an irresistible premise, and from here Clash could’ve turned out to be the best, and most unorthodox, chamber drama since Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, with the same delightful interpersonal tension and ever-present possibility of violence erupting. The protestors and counter-protestors hurl both eloquently-phrased insults at one another as well as less creative one-word epithets. Both sides dislike the journalists. One prisoner managed to smuggle in a cell phone and another has a razor blade. The enmity, however, always feels staged and play-acted rather than authentic.
The film does get genuine, partially, in the second act. But it is too concerned with ancillary plot and character development to hammer away at the inherent absurdity of this three-sides-in-one-paddy-wagon setup. Diab wants his characters to have arcs, to move from mutual hatred towards slow conciliation. Everyone is deliberately and painstakingly humanized, even the brutal military police responsible for interring the cast of characters in the truck in the first place. It is almost Disney, and it is far too much. Clash isn’t meant to be a plucky, we’re-all-in-this-together treatise on human goodness—and it does avoid becoming one because Diab is careful to not go all the way down the kumbaya path.
In itself, this reluctance to make the film as naively optimistic as possible is also a failure. There is ultimately no real thesis here. The ending moments of Clash are certainly exciting and chaotic (in part because of poor cinematography), but they are neither climatic nor indicative of any sort of culmination. Perhaps Diab is suggesting some kind of inherent fallen-ness for human nature and a vague social nihilism; if so, that claim is not averred powerfully or clearly enough. Rather, the film just ends, not arbitrarily but also without any sense of resolution.
Clash is always kinetic and sometimes spellbinding in offering viewers something new, and it’s just as often frustratingly cloying, mainstream and too mired in conventional character archetypes and narrative arcs. Diab does not allow his film to be everything it could be, because he wants it to have social power, to be persuasive and didactic. The didacticism, in particular, is over-performed. The tragedy here is that Clash could be a socially-efficacious argumentative piece that really does tell both Egyptian and world audiences something fundamental about Egypt, politics and modern life, but it is trying so hard to do just that that it gets in its own way. Putting “This is important” in neon letters is not the best way to communicate with an audience.
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