Cairo Time Review

A leisurely affair of the heart.

Patricia Clarkson has forged a long and prosperous career out of being a thinking woman’s well, thinking woman, and her cognitive talents are put to good use as a patient spouse contemplating a holiday romance in Ruba Nadda’s Cairo Time.

With her drawl and considered demeanour, diplomat’s wife Juliette (Clarkson) doesn’t exude spontaneity when she first arrives in Cairo for a welcome break from her busy career as a magazine editor in New York. In her standard issue smart casual blouse/chinos, she arrives hoping to steal a few precious weeks with her UN envoy husband, Mark, but is left to her own devices in the Egyptian capital when he is suddenly detained in Gaza. That she gradually succumbs to her charming and disarming tour guide has a degree of inevitability about it, but unlike most romantic travelogues of this sort, in Clarkson’s hands, the undoing of this happily married woman is mostly cerebral and entirely chaste.

When Juliette’s husband is held up by conflict in the refugee camp he manages, he asks his friend and former colleague, Taraq (Alexander Siddig), a Cairo native, to collect her from the airport. The two enjoy polite banter as he escorts her to her plush hotel to await news of her husband’s arrival. With no reunion in sight, cabin fever takes hold in her plush hotel suite, and the chivalrous Tareq escorts the self-conscious blonde American around the bustling capital (though interestingly, the independent Juliette seems to bring no Western prejudices about Arab men, and she retreats reluctantly to Tareq’s coffee shop for shelter, only when the overtures of several lusty locals prove too much for her to bear).

Writer/director Nadda’s script has all of the hallmarks of a vintage 'stranger in a strange land’ star-crossed lovers tale, with lengthy scenes of intelligent, witty banter, whiich pits Juliette’s idealism against Tareq’s world-weary, perhaps battle-scarred, pragmatism.

The busy magazine editor likes to think that her work is more substantive than its 'Drop a dress size’ cover lines might suggest, and refuses to identify herself with the shallow and ubiquitous 'petroleum wives’ that populate the embassy parties. For his part, the handsome Tareq is hardened by lost love, and a life lived on the frontlines of international diplomacy. Though thoroughly grown up in its handling of this flirtation with infidelity, Cairo Time can’t help but dabble in the stuff of melodrama, with its considered build-up to the 'could-we, should-we’ glances.

This modestly-budgeted Canadian production (a co-production arrangement with Ireland facilitated an Egyptian shoot) is exquisitely designed and cinematographer Luc Montpellier makes full use of the ancient architecture and contemporary urban settings. Nadda’s connection to Egypt stems from a family holiday, when the city left an indelible print upon the impressionable teen.

Clearly, there’s something to this 'Cairo Time’, but whilst Nada has crafted a solid musing on life choices and unexpected love, it’s no substitute for the real thing.