Cairo Time is sort of a middle-aged, less overtly romantic version of Before Sunrise, in which a pair of likable people stroll around a beautiful city together.
Patricia Clarkson stars as Juliette, who has come to Cairo for a vacation with her husband, who works for the United Nations in Gaza. He has been delayed by events there -- unspecified, but vaguely menacing -- and has asked one of his former assistants, Tareq (Alexander Siddig), to meet her at the airport. And so, for a week or so, as Juliette waits for her husband, she explores Cairo, usually with Tareq as her guide.
If you need a lot of plot or excitement from your movies, Cairo Time is most emphatically not for you; this is a mood piece. Like its characters, the movie is very reserved, sometimes too much so; more is said with gestures and glances than with dialogue, and the dialogue we do get often borders on the cheesy.
But Clarkson and Siddig are awfully good with those gestures and glances, and they're skilled enough actors that even the clunkier bits of dialogue are less annoying than they would be in lesser hands. And they're a lovely pair together, both tall and slender (Siddig almost improbably so, with oddly long arms), both comfortable with the faces and bodies they've aged into.
Not essential viewing, but a pleasant movie. If it appeals to you, it's probably worth the effort to see it on a big screen for the gorgeous photography and Cairo travelogue.
4 comments:
I've had a crush on both of those actors since I first saw them in The Untouchables and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.
The picture is headed straight to my Netflix queue, unless it comes to the Ross over at UNL.
Siddig has changed so much since the DS9 days. I don't think I'd have recognized him if I didn't know it was the same actor.
I just found out I can watch the picture via IFC on-demand! Hooray!
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