Cairo Time (Tuesday, August 24, 2010) (108)

There is not a heck of a lot of story in Ruba Nadda's Cairo Time. Juliette (Patricia Clarkson), a middle-aged American woman visiting the Egyptian capital to see her husband who is a U.N. aid worker in Gaza, meets Tareq (Alexander Siddig), a youngish good-looking guy who had worked with her husband but is now "retired." As her husband is being held up by his the work and she is left to explore the city by herself, she and Tareq consider a romantic fling, but never really fully commit to it.


I guess there's something romantic about the "almost-romance" here, but I found it pretty dull and unmotivated. Juliette seems to be pretty happy in her life. She complains a bit about how her grown kids now have their own lives, and she's certainly not thrilled to be abandoned by her husband, but all in all, she seems pretty happy. There is no real reason that wee see that she would fall for Tareq, aside from the demands of the banal script and the romance of beautiful post-card vistas she sees around her.


Throughout the film the dialogue is laughable and Tareq suffers most from this. At one point Juliette is speaking about how she's never been to the Middle-East and he quickly interrupts her saying, "I don't understand why they call it the 'Middle East.'" Uh - I don't know how to explain it to you, dude, but if you're speaking a language developed in the West, there's the Far East and the Middle East. That's about it.


Moments later she says something about how her daughter is in college studying creative writing, to which Tareq jumps in inquisitively saying, "Well, how will she make money doing this?" This is not a rhetorical thing, the way two Americans might joke about how there's no money to be made in artistic endeavors - this is a serious questions. To begin to explain "creative writing" here is ridiculous, let alone suggest that Egypt is home to a long history of great "creative writers".


On top of both of these things is the concept that Tareq is supposed to have worked in the U.N. for a decade or more and the idea that he is so un-cosmopolitan is ridiculous. He's never visited New York or Geneva? It's not like he's some scarf-wearing Bedouin who's never seen Western stuff. This is just sloppy and silly.


One of the most significant problems with the flow of the story is that Juliette and Tareq really only begin their almost-romance at the start of the third act. Before that they're hardly onscreen at the same time. Most of the first two acts have Juliette walking the streets and back-alleys of Cairo in silence (well, actually there's a beautiful piano score and a very nice use of traditional Egyptian music, including the magnificent Umm Kulthum). Basically nothing happens in this film before stuff starts happening.


This film is basically the recent Irish film Once, but with no music and no story. It's about how easy it is for two people to almost fall in love. That is suggests that this is some mid-life, mid-marriage crisis for Juliette is rather beside the point. Nadda would have been much smarter to re-write the script a bit and focus more attention on the couple's relationship instead of making such a tribute to the gorgeous sights of Cairo.


Stars: 1.5 of 4