Alexander Siddig and Patricia Clarkson’s romance boils down to a typical white-woman travelogue
Writer-director Ruba Nadda’s most interesting work so far has been her short films, which used simple scenarios to deal with issues of identity and desire with wit, insight and humour. Unfortunately, these virtues have yet to reveal themselves in her feature-length work. Her first feature, Sabah, was a disappointing cross-cultural romance, and now Cairo Time, her second at-bat, revisits the same territory, albeit with higher production values.
Juliette (Patricia Clarkson) arrives in Cairo to holiday with her husband Mark (Tom McCamus), a UN representative working in Gaza. When he is unexpectedly detained, he sends a former colleague, Tareq (Alexander Siddig), to meet Juliette at the airport. Tareq runs a café in town, he says, and he would be happy to show her the sights. Which he does.
What follows is a typical white-woman travelogue: She falls in love with the city while also falling in love with her tour guide. It’s a shame that Nadda fails to examine Juliette’s tourist gaze, where Tareq becomes for her the personification of exotic Arabic masculinity. After all, we get scenes of Egyptian men ogling her, a sequence where she invades a men-only café (Tareq’s, incidentally), and instances of her being shut out of public life generally — no surprise, since she is a triple outsider: A tourist, a white person and a woman.
Juliette waits in her hotel for phone calls from her husband or tries to wander the streets on her own, only to feel isolated and foreign. Which she is. But Tareq takes her along on boat rides on the Nile and visits to his favourite haunts to drink coffee, smoke and play chess. A failed attempt at joining her husband in Gaza further demonstrates Juliette’s dependence on Tareq.
At one point, Juliette meets a fellow ex-pat, a woman named Katherine (Elena Anaya) who takes her into the desert to have tea with a family she knows, which seems like a promising opportunity for Nadda to address some of the sexism and insularity of Egyptian society. It’s only one of two times we ever get close to an insider’s look at ordinary Egyptian life — the other is a brief encounter with a young woman on a bus, which turns into another adventure with Tareq. Even the intimate setting of a wedding becomes an attempt to reunite Tareq with an old flame, which turns into yet another near-romantic all-nighter ending up at the pyramids.
Actually, Nadda, who is Canadian (of Syrian descent), seems to be too enamoured of Cairo’s charms herself. The city itself is gorgeously depicted, from a shocking view of the pyramids from a lush green golf course to the usual sights of markets, mosques and picturesque fountains in hidden courtyards. While it focuses on the sights, expatriate life, the West’s eroticization of the East and politics in the Middle East in general are only very briefly touched upon, even though these subjects are central to the characters’ situation.
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