Hebba (Mona Zaki) is sort of a sex pot Tim Russert. With bright red lips and tight Eurotrash-girl-reporter get-ups, she intimidates the powerful guests of her politically controversial late-night talk show by all but crawling across the desk to interrogate them. Newly married (for the second time, as is repeatedly pointed out, lest we forget that this is the apparently 30-something’s Last Chance At Love) to an ambitious flunky at a State-run newspaper, Hebba submits to her husband’s aggressive request that she tone down her implicit criticism of contemporary Egyptian government by devoting her show to “stuff you can’t blame the government for” –– at least until he secures a key promotion. After an encounter with a shopgirl who cuts a glamorous Western-esque swath by day only to don a hijab to walk through streets littered with burning trash at night, Hebba figures she can give her husband the superficial human interest stories he wants and still slip in a bit of hard truth. The sob stories of Egypt’s everyday women turn out to be so politically incendiary that their fallout hits Hebba where she lives. Literally.

The existence of Yousry Nasrallah’s Scheherazade, Tell Me a Story within the contemporary Egyptian film industry mirrors the uneasiness of storytelling in a less-than-open state that’s at its story’s core. Both visually and politically provocative, the film has managed to triumph over controversy and censorship to become a huge critical and commercial hit in its home country. A triptych-within-a-story revealing women as the invisible victims of the Muslim world’s pains of growing into modernity, the epic drama sometimes wears its muckraking intentions a little too plainly on its sleeve, but its fusion of campy/soapy pleasures into serious social satire is unforgettable.

Scheherazade sets up Hebba’s tenuous home and work balance, and then temporarily leaves the host’s personal dramas behind, shifting attention to dramatizations of the stories three women present on Hebba’s show. In a mental clinic, Hebba finds a middle-aged beauty who, in rejecting a powerful man who wanted to take away her car and give her a veil, let her own Last Chance At Love pass her by. In the home of a sickly female prison guard, she finds a homely ex-con whose torrid love quadrangle between her two sisters and their young worker resolved in murder. It’s the story of a lady dentist who takes to the streets to protest the cabinet appointment of a man who betrayed her that really gets Hebba in trouble.

When we first see Hebba, she’s running towards herself. She’s fled her marriage bed in the middle of the night to watch tape of her own show from her living room treadmill, combining contemplation of the self in a moment of self-improvement. Her resistance to her husband’s wishes subsequently seems less a question of journalistic integrity and more to do with Hebba’s inability to contemplate a world that doesn’t revolve around herself. If the thesis of the film is that the personal is never more political than in a society that tries to legislate against desire, Scheherazade gets there by forcing its protagonist to understand that her narcissism can actually change the world — as long as she’s willing to reveal an image of herself that’s as naked as the “truth” she so ferociously drags out of other women.

As the film shifts format to accommodate its embedded stories, it becomes evident that on the set of Hebba’s show, the guest sits in front of a giant video projection of the host, and vice versa. We realize along with Hebba that she and the “the oppressed women” she profiles are the same, but she’s got to keep quiet about that until a crisis makes it impossible to ignore. In Scheherazade’s amazing final scene, Hebba reveals the scars of her own struggle for modernity, live on air, and concludes, “I guess no one’s better than anyone else.” When the show cuts to commercial, her producer asks Hebba how she feels. With black eye and puffy lips, she smiles. “Great!” This is what she wanted all along: to be the only one who can truly embody the hypocrisy of her world.  It’s a megalomaniac victory, and an enjoyably sick one.

Scheherazade’s Arabian Nights-inspired structure almost necessarily bloats in the middle, and director Nasrallah sometimes goes further than he needs to in his fuck-you to Egyptian standards of acceptable good taste (oppressed woman rock bottom is embodied in the second graphic abortion scene I’ve seen in an international art film this year; point me to a third and I’ll namecheck you in my trend piece.) For all its flaws, Scheherazade spectacularly calls to mind Pedro Almodovar’s early-to-mid career balls-out modern woman’s films, and as both entertainment and statement, easily trumps anything the Spanish director has made in a decade. If nothing else, Scheherazade inspires a kind of “I can’t believe this is happening, but I think I love it” awe, revealing how desperately self-serving Pedro and Penelope’s collaborations have become.