Film reviews: Cairo Time and Tehroun
It's Film Festival time in Munich, which means over here we get to see films on the big screen that otherwise take a year or more to reach us if they don't end up directly on tv during ungodly hours anyway. And there is a big audience for them. Case in point: yesterday, when I saw the first of the films I'm quickly reviewing in here, it wasn't only a sunny, hot Sunday afternoon but also the Germany versus England World Cup game. You couldn't wish for worse odds. And yet the cinema, showing a film with no big names (at least for a German audience) by a Canadian-Arab director, was packed. (Walking home afterwards in the game aftermath was something, though. It wasn't hard to deduce we'd won, what with the traffic having completetely stopped and everyone cheering on the road. *g*) Okay, back to the films I watched, yesterday and this morning, which only have one thing in common, other than that they're named after the capitals they take place in: their directors are in a sort-of-but-not-really between worlds position, being Arab Canadian and an Iranian living in France respectively. Oh, and they were both, in very different ways, immensely watchable.
Cairo Time, directed by Ruba Nadda and staring Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig in the main roles, is what tv guides like to call "an old fashioned love story", a description that to my mind doesn't quite fit. It's a film simultanously restrained and tender, with much affection for its characters and its setting, which is Cairo. (Duh.) There isn't much of an outward plot: journalist Juliette, wife of a UN diplomate who is busy in Gaza, visits Cairo and gets escorted by local Tareq who used to work for her husband and has remained friends with him. While we're exclusively in Juliette's pov, the film manages to avoid clichés both in terms of orientalism and in terms of relationships. (With one scene excepted; when Juliette leaves her hotel on her own for the first time, she's quickly followed and hit upon by a couple of men. I've visited Egypt a couple of times, twice on my own, and while as a single woman you do get some looks and the occasional pass, it's not as blatant as depicted here.) (But then again, we all have different experiences, and maybe I was lucky?) Her absent (except for the very end of the film) husband isn't an ogre (we see her on the phone with him a couple of times), nor is her marriage lacking in love. Tareq's old flame Yasmeen, who is clearly still interested in him, isn't a mean rival, and when Juliette and she have a conversation of their own later in the film, it's not about Tareq but about their adult daughters.
Which brings me to another sadly still not that common aspect: this film focuses on characters who are in their late 40s or older and are played by actors of that age, and the cinematography treats them as lovingly as is usually reserved for young 'uns, not in a way that fakes youtfulness but in a way that celebrates the physicality of middle age. And they're gorgeous; having seen Patricia Clarkson only as Sarah in Six Feet Under before, where she was already middle-aged, I don't know what she looked like young, but I can't imagine it was as good, because she has the type of face that gains character and incredible expressiveness with the years. Same goes for Amina Annabi as Yasmeen. Alexander Siddig, aka Siddig El Fadil, I know of course as a young man playing Julian Bashir on DS9, and there he was pretty, but here he's devastingly sexy in a way that really wasn't the case earlier on. Also, the director really trusts her actors, who manage to convey such a lot with looks and body language. (Juliette and Tareq on the train back from Alexandria to Cairo after attending the wedding of Yasmeen's daughter are completely silent, simply sitting opposite each other and looking at each other, and yet it feels more intimate and charged than if they were making out.
Not that the dialogue is bad, mind you; for example, when Juliette expresses indignation about the young girls working at a carpet factory, Tareq asks back how many carpets there are in her house, and the houses of her friends in the States. And we get a mini story within the story when Juliette makes an abortive attempt to visit her husband in Gaza via bus and befriends one of the few other women in said bus, and then the bus is stopped at the border. The difference in treatment for Juliette and for the Egyptian and Palestinian passengers is conveyed simply via tone of voice and a view words.
Even when the film does go for the familiar image, the pyramids, it manages to do so in a way that doesn't feel trite or repeating what's been shown thousand times before. It's the emotional climax of the movie, as Juliette, due to a promise to her husband, has been exploring everything in Cairo but the pyramids, and we've only been seeing them in fragments and from a distance. But in place of where in another film would be a big conversation, admission of feelings followed by fervent love making, she and Tareq simply go there and share the sunrise, and it somehow manages to feel incredibly romantic, as if you'd never saw the pyramids or an early morning before.
In conclusion, I'll look for more films from this director, and am glad to have seen this one.
Tehroun was directed by Nader T. Homayoun, whose first non-documentary film this was, and who was also present for a Q & A afterwards. He left Iran as a teenager and is now living in Paris, but the film was shot on location in Teheran. It tells the story of Ibrahim (Ali Ebdali), a provincial who at the start of the film survives in the big city by working for a racketeer as a beggar, complete with baby as a prop. (Most of the money goes to the racketeer.) Ibrahim shares rooms with two other friends, Fatah (Farzin Modades) and Madjid (Missagh Zareh), and the film has some early light moments as Ibrahim comes to actually care for the baby, but then the inevitable happens and when Ibrahim is on another job and Madjid is supposed to be watching the baby, it gets stolen, the racketeer is furious, and the noir part of the film kicks in with a vengeance just as Ibrahim's wife is arriving for a visit.
The camera rarely if ever goes above eye level, i.e. we see only as much as the characters see, no sweeping helicopter flighters over Teheran. While the hapless Ibrahim is the main character, this is more of an ensemble film, and even later arrivals on the scene like Ibrahim's wife Zahra (Sara Barahmi) hold their own, as does a character who is basically only in two sequences named Shirine, played by Sharzad Kamal Zadeh; in the first, Shirine, who is a prostitute, is conning Madjid (when he's supposed to be babysitting), in the second, we see her after the consequences have caught up with her, and her entirely different demeanour and face tell a story by themselves.
The Q & A afterwards was vivid, as the first questioner was another Iranian abroad who basically declared Nader T. Homayoun was falsifying Iran for the benefit of Westerners and couldn't have been there for a long time, and that he didn't recognize any of the Teheran depicted, with child-trafficking, thieves disguising themselves as guards to carry out raids, and prostitutes. To which Mr. Homayoun declared he still visits Iran twice a year and that noir stylisation or no noir stylisation, prostitutes, gangs and child trafficking as well as extreme poverty driving people to participate in all this is present in Iran. Then a woman wearing a blue hijab stood up and agreed that yes, it was, and that was the end of the "is/is not!" part of the exchange. Another woman in the audience, who seemed to be a reporter, scribbling away, confessed she hadn't understood one particular plot point, and Mr. Homayoun smiled and said that this kept happening, proving to him one of the differences in which Western audiences recognize (or not) visual cues, because the items she hadn't recognized (neither had I, btw) were what a human "mule" wears for smuggling opium. I thought, that's right, we're so used to see little plastic bags filled with white powder as signalling "drug". Also interesting were the questions about shooting in Iran; the director said that because men and women aren't allowed to be depicted in anything resembling physical intimacy, he couldn't, for example, show a kiss between Ibrahim and his wife when he first sees her again after months. There was also a scene in which a gang of thieves, in disguise as guards, crashes an illegal party so they can blackmail and rob the guests, and that ran first into the problem that no actress could be shown with uncovered hair (so at last some non-actor friends of his volunteered for the establishing shot of the party), and secondly the (male) actors wouldn't be shown in the same frame with the women with uncovered hair, and so he had to cut from the party, to them outside in the floor, kicking the door open, to the leader demanding "what's this etc" (with the other men and the floor behind him, so they're not shown in the same frame as the people playing the guests), so the next scene where the good from the raid are distributed.
The result of all of this is a suspenseful thriller, but you have to be pay attention; not something you see if you just want light entertainment or aren't willing to engage your brain, because not every clue is spelled out. Worth watching.
Cairo Time, directed by Ruba Nadda and staring Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig in the main roles, is what tv guides like to call "an old fashioned love story", a description that to my mind doesn't quite fit. It's a film simultanously restrained and tender, with much affection for its characters and its setting, which is Cairo. (Duh.) There isn't much of an outward plot: journalist Juliette, wife of a UN diplomate who is busy in Gaza, visits Cairo and gets escorted by local Tareq who used to work for her husband and has remained friends with him. While we're exclusively in Juliette's pov, the film manages to avoid clichés both in terms of orientalism and in terms of relationships. (With one scene excepted; when Juliette leaves her hotel on her own for the first time, she's quickly followed and hit upon by a couple of men. I've visited Egypt a couple of times, twice on my own, and while as a single woman you do get some looks and the occasional pass, it's not as blatant as depicted here.) (But then again, we all have different experiences, and maybe I was lucky?) Her absent (except for the very end of the film) husband isn't an ogre (we see her on the phone with him a couple of times), nor is her marriage lacking in love. Tareq's old flame Yasmeen, who is clearly still interested in him, isn't a mean rival, and when Juliette and she have a conversation of their own later in the film, it's not about Tareq but about their adult daughters.
Which brings me to another sadly still not that common aspect: this film focuses on characters who are in their late 40s or older and are played by actors of that age, and the cinematography treats them as lovingly as is usually reserved for young 'uns, not in a way that fakes youtfulness but in a way that celebrates the physicality of middle age. And they're gorgeous; having seen Patricia Clarkson only as Sarah in Six Feet Under before, where she was already middle-aged, I don't know what she looked like young, but I can't imagine it was as good, because she has the type of face that gains character and incredible expressiveness with the years. Same goes for Amina Annabi as Yasmeen. Alexander Siddig, aka Siddig El Fadil, I know of course as a young man playing Julian Bashir on DS9, and there he was pretty, but here he's devastingly sexy in a way that really wasn't the case earlier on. Also, the director really trusts her actors, who manage to convey such a lot with looks and body language. (Juliette and Tareq on the train back from Alexandria to Cairo after attending the wedding of Yasmeen's daughter are completely silent, simply sitting opposite each other and looking at each other, and yet it feels more intimate and charged than if they were making out.
Not that the dialogue is bad, mind you; for example, when Juliette expresses indignation about the young girls working at a carpet factory, Tareq asks back how many carpets there are in her house, and the houses of her friends in the States. And we get a mini story within the story when Juliette makes an abortive attempt to visit her husband in Gaza via bus and befriends one of the few other women in said bus, and then the bus is stopped at the border. The difference in treatment for Juliette and for the Egyptian and Palestinian passengers is conveyed simply via tone of voice and a view words.
Even when the film does go for the familiar image, the pyramids, it manages to do so in a way that doesn't feel trite or repeating what's been shown thousand times before. It's the emotional climax of the movie, as Juliette, due to a promise to her husband, has been exploring everything in Cairo but the pyramids, and we've only been seeing them in fragments and from a distance. But in place of where in another film would be a big conversation, admission of feelings followed by fervent love making, she and Tareq simply go there and share the sunrise, and it somehow manages to feel incredibly romantic, as if you'd never saw the pyramids or an early morning before.
In conclusion, I'll look for more films from this director, and am glad to have seen this one.
Tehroun was directed by Nader T. Homayoun, whose first non-documentary film this was, and who was also present for a Q & A afterwards. He left Iran as a teenager and is now living in Paris, but the film was shot on location in Teheran. It tells the story of Ibrahim (Ali Ebdali), a provincial who at the start of the film survives in the big city by working for a racketeer as a beggar, complete with baby as a prop. (Most of the money goes to the racketeer.) Ibrahim shares rooms with two other friends, Fatah (Farzin Modades) and Madjid (Missagh Zareh), and the film has some early light moments as Ibrahim comes to actually care for the baby, but then the inevitable happens and when Ibrahim is on another job and Madjid is supposed to be watching the baby, it gets stolen, the racketeer is furious, and the noir part of the film kicks in with a vengeance just as Ibrahim's wife is arriving for a visit.
The camera rarely if ever goes above eye level, i.e. we see only as much as the characters see, no sweeping helicopter flighters over Teheran. While the hapless Ibrahim is the main character, this is more of an ensemble film, and even later arrivals on the scene like Ibrahim's wife Zahra (Sara Barahmi) hold their own, as does a character who is basically only in two sequences named Shirine, played by Sharzad Kamal Zadeh; in the first, Shirine, who is a prostitute, is conning Madjid (when he's supposed to be babysitting), in the second, we see her after the consequences have caught up with her, and her entirely different demeanour and face tell a story by themselves.
The Q & A afterwards was vivid, as the first questioner was another Iranian abroad who basically declared Nader T. Homayoun was falsifying Iran for the benefit of Westerners and couldn't have been there for a long time, and that he didn't recognize any of the Teheran depicted, with child-trafficking, thieves disguising themselves as guards to carry out raids, and prostitutes. To which Mr. Homayoun declared he still visits Iran twice a year and that noir stylisation or no noir stylisation, prostitutes, gangs and child trafficking as well as extreme poverty driving people to participate in all this is present in Iran. Then a woman wearing a blue hijab stood up and agreed that yes, it was, and that was the end of the "is/is not!" part of the exchange. Another woman in the audience, who seemed to be a reporter, scribbling away, confessed she hadn't understood one particular plot point, and Mr. Homayoun smiled and said that this kept happening, proving to him one of the differences in which Western audiences recognize (or not) visual cues, because the items she hadn't recognized (neither had I, btw) were what a human "mule" wears for smuggling opium. I thought, that's right, we're so used to see little plastic bags filled with white powder as signalling "drug". Also interesting were the questions about shooting in Iran; the director said that because men and women aren't allowed to be depicted in anything resembling physical intimacy, he couldn't, for example, show a kiss between Ibrahim and his wife when he first sees her again after months. There was also a scene in which a gang of thieves, in disguise as guards, crashes an illegal party so they can blackmail and rob the guests, and that ran first into the problem that no actress could be shown with uncovered hair (so at last some non-actor friends of his volunteered for the establishing shot of the party), and secondly the (male) actors wouldn't be shown in the same frame with the women with uncovered hair, and so he had to cut from the party, to them outside in the floor, kicking the door open, to the leader demanding "what's this etc" (with the other men and the floor behind him, so they're not shown in the same frame as the people playing the guests), so the next scene where the good from the raid are distributed.
The result of all of this is a suspenseful thriller, but you have to be pay attention; not something you see if you just want light entertainment or aren't willing to engage your brain, because not every clue is spelled out. Worth watching.