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Youssef
Francis
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The
alter ego
Will
the real Youssef please stand up?
Profile
by Nadia Abou El-Magd
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He fell in love with colors, so he
paints. He fell in love with letters, so he writes books. He
loves life, so he writes screenplays and directs movies. Where
to begin the interview" From the end, he replied without
hesitation. The end turned out to be his latest movie, Habibati
Man Takun, or Who Is My Beloved?" It is a very emotional,
romantic movie, about two men who fall in love with the same
woman. It probes the question of what we can or should sacrifice
in love. Can a man sacrifice so much that he is willing to give
up the woman he loves, if she finds her happiness with some one
else? That is the question." It is not a new one, but
Francis believes he has a new answer. "The woman, who is
suffering from a rare disease, won't remember either of them.
Yet the 'emotional conflict' will not end painfully for any of
them. We have to learn to love and lose with grace, we have to
go back to chivalry, to the sentiments associated with
knighthood."
The film, written and directed by
Francis, took the gold at the Sixth Cairo Radio and Television
Festival in August. It also won the LE10,000 prize awarded to
the best director of a movie addressing human values at the
Sixteenth Alexandria Cinema Festival in September. Before
leaving to Alexandria, Francis told me: "I chose to begin
from the end, because that takes you back to the past, the real
beginning."
The beginning, therefore, is a
good place to go from here, and this is what he does, weaving
the tale in his soft, sleepy voice as he sits beside his
favorite lamp in his chaotic studio in Zamalek. "I was born
drawing. Drawing is what I liked most as a child. I used to
spread paper out on the floor and start drawing. I didn't cry or
anything." He was three or four when this obsession took
hold. "The paper, crayons, trees, cats, dogs and horses:
these were my friends, my society."
This was the environment in which
Francis was raised in his aunt's household. In a twist worthy of
his most melodramatic plot twists, at the age of 14, he
discovered that, contrary to what he had always believed, his
aunt was not his mother. He rescued a "sweet girl"
being harassed by some boys on the train, then walked her home,
only to have the stunning truth revealed to him: she was none
other than his half-sister. Young Francis then discovered that
his real mother had died while giving birth to him. "Still,
I kept loving my aunt as if she were my mother. I was never able
to stop. Nor have I ever been able even to glance at my mother's
pictures -- not even today," he admits in voice charged
with emotion. He is 66, and the pain has diminished not a jot.
"All I know about my mother is that she used to play piano,
so I fell in love with the piano and the first love of my life
was a piano instructor."
Is that why the women in his
paintings are always so sad? "I don't know, but as far as I
am concerned only sad women are real. Laughing women do not
attract me." If women did not exist, then, would there be
any need for art? "No, because Eve was created out of
Adam's need for her," he replies promptly. "Eve, for
Adam, is life itself."
"He writes like a ballet
dancer, paints like a poet and speaks like a philosopher,"
says eminent Akhbar Al-Youm writer Ahmed Ragab in the forward to
Francis's book Paris, Through the Back Door. "His papers
identify him as Youssef Francis; his friends call him Joe; I
call him the Lord of Bulaq, because he is quintessentially noble
in his manners, his dealings with people, and his love life
too." Francis is a Gemini, but a simple split personality
is not enough for him. "I have four personalities, each of
which is faithful to something:" this is one of his first
startling confessions at the beginning of our conversation.
"You can't divide love," he continues, "and I'm
always trying to fulfill my dreams. Sometimes I do so on a blank
sheet of paper, at other times by writing a book, or making a
film." One of the many individuals jostling for space
inside this unassuming man is an artist; another a director, the
third a writer and the last "Joe, the man." It is not
easy to know which is the real Youssef Francis; certainly, he
neither knows nor cares to choose. What he does know is that
"directing a movie is like conducting an orchestra, while
in painting it is you, and the subject, and the statement."
The one thing he wanted very badly
to do was poetry. He failed." Poetry is the father of all
the arts. Great pain produces poems, but my pain did not."
Francis has a dozen books with titles like Love Sometimes, Love
Always; Voyages of Love and Insanity; and Answers We Fear."
I like people to read my paintings," he says suddenly.
"I draw with my heart, not with my eye or my hand, and I
like people to feel that." Drawing for him is a moment of
choice: you choose what you are going to draw, but life is full
of heroes, and the artist's task is to choose the hero who gives
off a special energy, he believes. The titles of his works could
well be wrenched from an artist's greatest moments of
perplexity: Blood Wedding, After the Storm, Invitation, The
Coffin, Life's Fading, Out of Paradise, Will He Return?
Francis started writing
screenplays as early as 1965, but only tried his hand at
directing in 1974. Every new endeavour is a "voyage of
friendship" to him. His films engage social issues more
explicitly than do his paintings. In the early 1980s, The Addict
tackled the problem of drug addiction. Then there was Wild
Flowers, which addressed the problem faced by young emigrants;
and in My Friend, How Much Are You Worth? he followed the
frustrations associated with the return to the homeland. One of
his best-known films, however, is A Bird from the East, about
the renowned late man of letters, Tawfiq Al-Hakim. It recounts
Hakim's years as a student in Paris in the 1920s, and his return
to Egypt. Departures and returns are a recurrent theme, then --
perhaps because, according to Francis, "the bird from the
East must return to the East." He was intent upon finishing
the film during Hakim's lifetime, which he did.
His favorite colours are the
white, "the bread of colours," black, "like
night, which reveals the beauty of the other colours," and
gold, "which is, like silver, a rich colour." In his
studio, a Venetian sunset hangs on the wall. "I adore
Venice, I wouldn't mind drowning there," he says
off-handedly. "It is a city that really appreciates the
violin; it deserves that one die in and for it."
"I dreamt of peace for all
children: white for hope and green for the future... But
they tore out the heart that dreamt of tomorrow, and
tainted the white with blood. Now only black remains in
my heart"
Youssef
Francis's most recent work, created especially for the
Weekly, was inspired by the massacres in Jerusalem
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In another corner is a large painting
of a young woman wearing white, standing beside a horse.
"This is my daughter, my greatest achievement," he
says proudly. Somehow this strikes a dissonant note, coming as
it does from someone who can hardly be identified as a family
man. His wife is Saudi Arabian, a journalist; "we cherish
each other's space and privacy," he says abruptly. All he
will add is: "People change every five years, and the
marriage contract should be renewable every five years."
Abandoning this topic, then, we move on to horses, a recurrent
theme in his paintings. "I've always wanted to ride,
because I was raised among horses and I love them passionately.
Horses are very noble creatures, and in my paintings they are
symbols of valour, speed and freedom."
In the middle of the cluttered
room is another enormous portrait: a woman typical of Francis's
sad, idealised angels, with perfect bodies barely clad in
revealing little nothings. "The most difficult thing in a
portrait is the spark in the eyes. You can't learn it, you have
to feel it. It is the last element in the portrait, and it has
to be there even if the eyes are closed." Beautiful eyes,
according to him, don't necessarily remain so after fifteen
minutes of trying to paint them. "The most beautiful eyes
are the most truthful," he says eventually.
There is another painting, too, in
muted tones of gray and white, which he calls The Intellectual.
" I feel I haven't finished it yet," he exclaims with
poorly disguised impatience, "yet my friends all tell me it
is complete."
So will this portraitist
extraordinaire allow others to capture him on canvas? The best
rendition of him is by his mentor, the renowned artist Bikar,
who painted him 20 years after they had first met, while Francis
was telling him about a problem.
Francis graduated from the Faculty
of Fine Arts and began work as an artist at Rose El-Youssef a
year after graduating in 1958. His avant-garde sensibilities
inspired him to set up installations long before the concept was
in vogue; he once used 500 candles to illuminate one of his
exhibitions, as well as old watches and broken glass "to
express life, love and time." At another event, prominent
writer Mohamed Hassanein Heikal found his attention drawn to a
charred tree trunk adorned only with two buttons in it. The
trunk was all that remained of a tree from the garden of
Francis's aunt, which burned while he was abroad. The two blue
buttons were from a coat of hers; she used to measure him
against them.
Heikal, editor-in-chief of
Al-Ahram at the time, brought Francis and his tree to the
newspaper in 1964. The scorched tree is the first thing that
meets you in his office on the fifth floor of the old building.
As if all his other alter egos
were not enough, he goes to the movies -- some more than once --
with a pencil and notebook, and jots down his favourite phrases.
Among the words of wisdom he has compiled, one strikes me:
"Destiny is a beautiful woman who comes to you
unexpectedly." Where did he read this sentence? "I
didn't read it anywhere, I just invented it," he says with
a big smile. He also particularly likes "Who said that
women are selfish? They just love themselves." Another of
his favourite sentences -- perhaps the most revealing -- is a
line pronounced by Jean-Paul Belmondo: "The best surprise
is to wake up and find myself still there."
photos: Randa Shaath
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