Hyped Cairo Time a modest romance
Cairo Time
Director: Ruba Nadda
Stars: Patricia Clarkson, Alexander Siddig
Classification: STC
Rating: *** 1/2
Winner of the Best Canadian Feature prize at TIFF, Ruba Nadda’s Cairo Time is being hyped to the moon as this fall’s homegrown theatrical hit, but please don’t hold that against it.
There’s nothing nearly so aggressive in the film, which orbits Juliette, a Canadian magazine editor stranded on vacation in the eponymous Egyptian capital while her husband toils for the United Nations. She’s played by Patricia Clarkson, an actress with a knack for inhabiting plausibly intelligent characters: she does an excellent job of modulating Juliette’s culture shock without turning her into a naïf.
The first movements of Cairo Time are very much a one woman show, but Clarkson eventually gets a worthy screen partner in Alexander Siddig, who plays Tareq, a soulful, slightly doleful coffee house manager who becomes Juliette’s escort through the bustling streets and then a possible romantic option as her husband’s absence drags on.
The Brief Encounter set-up and evocation of vacation time-melancholy clearly recall Lost in Translation. But while Nadda lacks Sofia Coppola’s offhand visual sophistication, she’s also a more mature filmmaker, with no stomach for poor-little--rich-girl affectations.
Clarkson may be playing an outsider, but it’s clear that Nadda has a feeling for the city and its rhythms that elides simple exoticism, and ace cinematographer Luc Montpellier locates a textural sweet spot pitched bewitchingly between glittering and gritty.
Perhaps Cairo Time isn’t much more than a good-looking, well-acted contemporary romantic drama, but that’s fine: Its modesty is becoming.
