Cairo Time (2009)
Directed by Ruba Nadda
In Cairo on her own as she waits for her husband, Juliette finds herself caught in a whirlwind romance with his friend Tareq, a retired cop. As Tareq escorts Juliette around the city, they find themselves in the middle of a brief affair that catches them both unawares.
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This is “Before Sunrise’’ territory.
And as with Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, part of the great joy to be taken from Cairo Time is in watching these two strangers as they stroll the streets of a remarkable city, getting to know each other, intimately.
The demands of the multiplex make films like “Cairo Time” more welcome than ever: with an emphasis on male-female talk (a la Before Sunrise) and the Egyptian scenery, Nadda takes her film at a healthy walking pace.
Nadda has written a script that can't quite muster the drive to endow more than two characters with any dimensionality, yet it seems to lack the temerity to restrict itself entirely to these two people and see what it can show us about them (à la Before Sunset ), minus the dramatic convenience of a few supporting foils.
Juliette's Stupid Tourist episodes lead to loneliness, frustration, and humiliation, which in turn prompt her to seek out Tareq, who is seemingly always up for long walks and longer conversations—think Before Sunset, weighed down by awkward articulation of the central couple's cultural differences.
This movie will no doubt be compared to Lost in Translation and Before Sunset , delicate tales of dislocated souls who find solace in other, equally dislocated souls, usually in a foreign land.
The editor of a Cosmo-style magazine, this Fun Fearless Female brashly wanders the streets of Cairo with no head covering, thus inspiring the congregation of a sinister swarm of men whose lascivious designs are as aggressively forthright as the group that plagued Monica Vitti in L'Avventura .
I was reminded in some ways of Sofia Coppola 's " Lost in Translation ," with Bill Murray as a has-been actor whiling away his jet lag in Tokyo .
Hence: Cairo Time , which would sound exactly like " Lost in Translation with a middle-aged Scarlett Johansson" if I told you the plot, and would probably never sound like anything else no many how details I added.
"Cairo Time," in many ways a fitting companion piece to Sofia Coppola's 2003 contemporary masterwork " Lost in Translation ," is consistently low-key and observant, an achingly beautiful snapshot of little more than a moment in time and the impact it has on two people who, at the end of the day, live on opposite sides of the world.
This movie will no doubt be compared to Lost in Translation and Before Sunset , delicate tales of dislocated souls who find solace in other, equally dislocated souls, usually in a foreign land.
Like Tokyo in "Lost in Translation," Cairo plays a role unto itself in "Cairo Time," which like that earlier film seems steeped in an ethereal, slightly dazed sense of dislocation.
Like Jeanne Moreau in La Notte, she can spend five minutes just staring at ravaged buildings, vacant lots and tired day laborers without boring the audience.