Movie review: Cairo Time

by John P. Meyer

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For lovers of good old-fashioned romance, this is a film not to be missed.

Writer/director Ruba Nadda has captured my heart. Anyone who can create a film as beautiful (and as beautifully touching) as Cairo Time will forever have a place in my pantheon of filmmaking heroes.

The enormously talented Patricia Clarkson stars in this deliciously exotic (yet delightfully old-fashioned) romance, turning in a deeply personal, often uncomfortably intimate performance as Juliette Grant, the wife of a United Nations operative who finds herself at loose ends in Cairo while she awaits the arrival of her husband. Acting as her Egyptian liaison is Cairo native Tariq Khalifa (dangerously charming Alexander Siddig), a trusted former employee of Juliette's husband who now owns and operates a cafe in the city.

Tariq meets Juliette at the airport and drives her to the hotel. She is clearly jet-lagged and bone-tired and just wants to get settled into her room. Tariq gives her his phone number and takes his leave, expecting not to hear anything further from the honey-haired wife of his old U.N. employer.

But events take an unexpected turn when Mark (Tom McCamus) is delayed for several days; there's trouble brewing in Gaza, and his duties prevent him from joining Juliette for their scheduled weekend getaway.

From her balcony overlooking the Nile, Juliette observes the enchanting, alluring, captivating Arab world. When she can stand the isolation of her hotel no longer, she ventures out into the streets. As depicted in the film, the buildings of Cairo appear ancient and decrepit and crumbling, the thoroughfares jammed with drivers blaring away on their car horns.

Juliette quickly discovers that Cairo men are outrageously forward when it comes to bare-headed western women walking alone. Before long she finds herself at the forefront of a surge of blatantly ogling men, whose catcalls and reflexively grasping hands follow her all the way into Tariq's cafe. When he makes clear his stewardship of the brazen American hussy, her followers melt back into the anonymous mass of citizenry.

Tariq finds himself forced (by courtesy to her, and loyalty to her husband) into the position of public companion and tour guide for Juliette. With the date of Mark's anticipated arrival continually in flux -- the guests at an American Embassy dinner hint to Juliette that it could be quite a while before he gets out of Gaza -- Tariq and Juliette spend more and more time together and become fast friends. He shows her the wonders of Cairo first-hand; she opens herself up to him emotionally in a way that he is completely unprepared to deal with. Their platonic relationship is in danger of taking on an entirely un-platonic aspect. Filmmaker Nadda craftily succeeds in allowing us filmgoers to realize this before, it seems, the characters of Tariq and Juliette do.

By the time they travel together to Alexandria to attend a wedding celebration hosted by Tariq's ex-beau Yasmeen (Amina Annabi), Tariq and Juliette are, for all intents and purposes, dating. The extended episode of soul-searching eye contact they share on the train ride back to Cairo is charged with erotic promise.

Cairo Time is a slow-boiler that takes its time in bringing these two lonely souls together. Graced by Niall Byrne's romantic piano score and enriched by gritty, unglamorized views of the streets and bazaars and shadowed stone monuments of the time-haunted city, this wonderfully melancholic ode to impossible love and desperate longing is a film that should not be missed by lovers of classic romance.

Or just plain lovers.

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