Voluptuous scenery and a couple of romantic leads cannot save this film from the slowness that builds like the pyramids.
Oscar nominated Patricia Clarkson gives it her all in this psychological romance but her all is not good enough. It is too much of the same scene of doubt, doubt and more doubt combined with mystery. Clarkson plays Juliette Grant, the wife of successful, dedicated and perhaps even swashbuckling UN refugee camp specialist Mark (Tom McCamus). The problem is that Mark is not there. He has been detained in Gaza.
A great start. When one’s husband is detained in Gaza there are many possible explanations and most of them are bad. There is even the most pregnant of story explanations that husband Mark is not really detained at all but has disappeared either by his own intention or through the intentions of others. There are several great stories that could come out of this and the reader is not going to find out which one of those stories is the real one without watching the film.
Having said that, the film does what it does much too slowly and with much too little spice and dynamic. Alexander Siddig plays right hand man Tareq who was secretly in love with Yasmeen many years before. He was forced to closet his desire because Yasmeen was married. Now that she has been widowed there romance may rekindle again. That is, unless Juliette and he enter into an illicit romance of their own while they are waiting for Mark to return.
If the reader wonders what Yasmeen has to do with Mark and Juliette, so is the rest of the audience. There is no particular causal relationship between the two. They are just the victims of unrequited love as is Juliette. Maybe. On the other hand, maybe she is as happy as any woman can hope to be. In any event there is no place for Yasmeen in this story, or the woman on the bus who stuffs the letter into Juliette’s purse or any of several other dead-end coincidences.
Maybe that’s the point, that life is a collection of dead-end coincidences that ultimately lead to nothing. Even if that were the truth it is not much to build a film on. That is why this film seems to take much too long to say much too little. There are several points in the dialog when viewers will throw up their hands in dismay. Not only are the same things said repeatedly but also they are said in the same tone of voice and with the same expression. Nothing is added.
I am a big Patricia Clarkson fan and I really liked the set-up of the disappearing lover in the Middle East. The story starts off as “The Other Irene (Cealalta Irina---directed by: Andrei Gruzsniczki)---based on the true story of a woman’s disappearance while on a foreign business trip. The film shares themes with the European thriller “The Vanishing” (George Sluizer, 1988) and the American movie by the same name (Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock --1993). The films are not an Agatha Christie update where the detective spells out every detail in the end. Some of the story is left to the audience to figure out, or fabricate, as they wish.
The problem with “Cairo” is that the lover comes back! OK, the whole idea was not to do the remake of the classics where he is gone forever. In any event, the film went from being a foreign mystery thriller where love fights against all odds to a love story, and that was a letdown for me. Also, Clarkson is a lot better doing comedy and/or being a part of a film that has a comedic core. In Cairo there was no place for her to go that was funny. Maybe she is trying to break away from that. But if she is, that’s a mistake. People need to laugh more than they need love stories.
If the film is poky and a few cards short of a thriller it is not due to the setting. Apparently shot on location the camerawork takes maximum advantage of the backdrop of the pyramids. The grandest structures in the work lend considerable weight of the grandest emotion of them all. The pyramids contrast with the claustrophobic alleyways of the markets and the screeching chaos that is the traffic on Cairo’s streets. It is enough to make anybody imagine things. It is also enough to make anybody fall in love. That is the question posed to the viewer. Is she in love, imagining things or wishing she were in love and imagining the events that would have to take place to make that possible?
The sound track is consistently torch singer lounge music that could be considered romantic if one was in the right mood but might be considered elevator / department store Musak if one was in the wrong mood. What the average viewer will think is anybody’s guess. However, viewers who saw Clarkson at her romantic-comedic best in “Station Agent and “Whatever Works” will yearn for a return to roles where she is not so serious all the time.
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Directed and Written by: Ruba Nadda
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