We seem to be in crisis mode when it comes to masculinity: the Tate brothers, looksmaxxing, Hegsethian obsessions with testosterone and TikTok videos awash in pumped bodies spouting unapologetic misogyny. The fear of effeminization has never felt so acute, which presumably is why Matt Damon’s Odysseus needed bulging muscles, to ensure his sensitivity was mitigated by pecs of steel. There are lots of theories one can subscribe to that seek to explain why being male at this moment in time is at the center of the culture wars, and while Muhammad Mustapha’s “Big Boys Don’t Cry” eschews the bigger picture, his personal journey towards understanding the highly artificial construct of masculinity, via a group of Egyptian bodybuilders, places apprehension at the very heart of the matter.
How else can we explain why some men torture their bodies into unnatural shapes, other than a terror of powerlessness? The men in Mustapha’s docu-fiction hybrid are all working-class guys whose outsized bodies allow them to instill fear in everyone whose dominance is of the less physical kind. Yet to undergo the kind of pain they embrace, to willingly become slaves of their own steroid-plumped bodies, takes the concept to another dimension. “Big Boys” doesn’t attempt to hide the director’s ambivalent gaze, mesmerized by the sheer mass of deltoids and triceps whose exaggerated size borders on the cartoonish. Instead, Mustapha seeks to understand his own fascination with (literally) inflated forms of masculinity, which led him on this 10-year journey with bodybuilders whose aura of menace isn’t always undercut by hoped-for revelations of sensitivity.
He opens with a montage of men training for fights, explaining in voiceover how he’s always wanted to shoot a fight scene but the camera failed to get to underneath the strange dance between softness and violence. Instead, he could only capture the performance, disappointed at how his view remained on the surface. The irony is that, by the film’s end, surface remains the most tangible element, unsurprising given that bodybuilding is by its very nature a theatrical construct whose visual impact is far more coherent than can be verbalized by the majority of its practitioners. On that level, Denis Côté’s “A Skin So Soft” was more accepting of the fascination offered by exteriors alone.
Though not addressed in the film, masculinity in Egypt was already a performative fabrication in the late 19th century, as discussed in Wilson Chacko Jacob’s trailblazing book “Working Out Egypt,” when so-called “effendi masculinity” sought to counter notions of colonial subjugation by emphasizing strength and the assertion of an at-times exaggerated concept of maleness. The bodybuilders in Mustapha’s focus are the inheritors of that model, using their Hulk-like muscles to exert temporary power over homegrown overlords who keep them in a kind of class subjugation. In this iteration, their physiques are displayed not for aesthetic purposes but as a visual manifestation of volatile power.
Abdullah Al-Araby, the main subject, is in many ways the perfect embodiment of this notion. Working as a bouncer (like many of his fellow bodybuilders) when not in the gym, Abdullah was in jail at one point — the film’s timeline can be frustratingly unclear — and remains invested in cultivating a menacing aura that’s marketable for those wanting to shake down associates. Unsurprisingly, when Abdullah and his friends are asked what roles they’d like to play if they turned to acting, all of them choose villains and mob bosses.
While “Perform” is the title assigned the film’s first chapter, in reality the term could be used throughout. “Construct” comes next, revealing the grueling effort it takes to maintain bodies of unnatural proportions. (A cupping scene accompanied by blood-letting is not for the squeamish.) Here, “no pain, no gain” is taken to its most extreme, where even the performance of pain, exemplified by the grimaces bodybuilders make in competitions where they distort not just their physiques but their expressions, underlines the notion that masculinity and agony go hand-in-hand.
At the end of the day, for all of Mustapha’s claims of friendship, the truth is his relationship with Abdullah cannot be an even one: the director is from the educated classes, able to move in and out of this world, whereas his subject is as trapped in his social status as he is in his body. A scene in which Abdullah practically tortures his very young sons for not pushing themselves harder becomes one of the film’s most revealing moments, even more so than the final shot where the two men are on a motorbike, their banter unwittingly revealing the insurmountable gap between them.
“Big Boys” would have benefited from a little more explanation: we know several scenes are staged, but their purpose can feel forced, and Mustapha’s fascination with these oversized exemplars of synthetic masculinity, stemming from his identification as a “sensitive” man, perhaps doesn’t go quite far enough. Largely devoid of homoeroticism (this is contemporary Egypt, after all), the film is unable to resolve its own conundrum: Are these exaggerated muscles attractive or repellent? And more importantly, what is this anxiety so many men feel about their emotions that drives them to torturously invent bodies that bear little resemblance to the human form?