a SIFF 2010 review
Lovely Cairo Time an Egyptian Gem
Juliette Grant (Patricia Clarkson) is in Cairo waiting for her husband Mark (Tom McCamus) to join her. Their first vacation together in what seems like ages she can’t wait for their time together to begin, just the thought of going to seeing the pyramids with her beloved enough to make the respected magazine fashion editor smile.
Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig in Cairo Time © IFC Films
But Mark is an official for the United Nations and recent events in Gaza have forced him to delay his trip to Cairo. In his stead, he has asked his former security chief now living in Cairo Tareq Khalifa (Alexander Siddig) to watch over and take care of Juliette until he can join her. But what starts blossoming into friendship quickly begins to bloom into something more, the two middle-aged adults realizing the connection between them has the potential to expand much further than they ever could have anticipated.
There is a simplistic beauty to writer/director Ruba Nadda’s Cairo Time that is very difficult to put your finger on. A follow up to her exquisite 2005 effort Sabah, this movie is a quiet, beautifully moving adult drama that held me perfectly captivated for its entire running time. I was almost awed by the way it felt, looked and moved, the whole thing anchored by a pair of exquisite performances be Clarkson and Siddig that both rank as two of the finest I’ve seen this year.
On the surface this could have been nothing more than a lovingly photographed travelogue. American woman travels to Egypt, discovers a clash of cultures, takes in the sights and learns new things about herself she didn’t even expect. She wanders the streets and has epiphanies, and as routine cinematic tropes go this is one that seldom goes out of vogue (When in Rome, Letters to Juliet and the upcoming Julia Roberts melodrama Eat Pray Love being the most notable 2010 examples).
But Nadda, with almost stunning insight and even more incredible subtlety, dives much deeper than that. Her film isn’t just a clash of cultures or an awakening of the spirit but instead a journey into a woman’s heart that stirs right down to her very soul. It asks difficult questions about life, love and marriage and does so in an honest and truthful way. This is a movie that tackles the big ideas but does it with humility and grace, everything happening in a way that never belittles its characters or talks down to its audience treating both with the respect they richly deserve.
Clarkson was nominated for a Best Supporting Actress Oscar back in 2003 for her work in Pieces of April and has long been one of the finest character actresses working in Hollywood today. She moves between projects big (Shutter Island), small (Phoebe in Wonderland) and delectably in-between (Vicky Cristina Barcelona). Here she delivers one of her absolute finest performances discovering internal layers to Juliette that the script only fleetingly hints at. She makes this woman a three dimensional force, and by the time this story was over I almost found myself wishing Nadda would tell us another one about her just as long as she made sure to bring Clarkson back along for the ride.
Siddig has long been one of the most criminally underrated actors working today. While his face is recognizable (he’s popped up in Syriana, the sixth season of “24” and was most recently seen in both Doomsday and the Clash of the Titans remake) I doubt most audiences would know his name. This is sad, because the guy has an ability to dig deeply inside his characters and even in something as relatively forgettable as The Nativity Story is moments have a tendency to stand out.
The actor comes alive here. He is Tareq, and watching him grow closer and closer to Juliette even as he knows he needs to try and keep his distance is simply superb. Both Siddig and Clarkson have remarkable chemistry, and while I knew this love had about as much a chance at success as say the ones in Brief Encounter or in Once there was still this large part of me that desperately wanted them to be together.
Nadda understands intimacy and the barriers that keep people from it, and her film just drips in authenticity as it represents both the city it is set in and the characters walking down its streets. Cairo Time isn’t about success or failure, about life or death. It is instead about the smallest choices we make in our lives and how sometimes the opportunity arises to look back at them just when we least expect it. It is a drama about the eternal mechanisms that make all of us who we are, and about the divine minimalism of looking at humanity’s marvels with fresh eyes ready to devour the world anew.
Film Rating: êêê1/2 (out of 4)
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