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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Patricia Clarkson owns screen in Cairo Time

By: Randall King

Posted: 10/16/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

IN her last feature film, the sweet and sensual Sabah, writer-director Ruba Nadda plunked a 40-year-old single Arab woman (played by Arsinee Khanjian) in deepest Toronto, where she found forbidden love with a Canadian hoser and blossomed.

Nadda inverts that dynamic in Cairo Time, the film that won the prize as best Canadian film at this year's Toronto International Film Festival.

Movie Review

Cairo Time

Starring Patricia Clarkson and Alexander Siddig

Grant Park

3 stars out of 5

This time, it's a WASPish looking Canadian woman, Juliette (Patricia Clarkson) who finds herself in the alien Muslim world of Egypt.

Juliette is married, apparently happily, to Mark (Tom McCamus), a UN bureaucrat who is delayed doing sensitive work in Gaza when Juliette arrives.

They vowed to see the pyramids together. But when Mark fails to show (and she can't even get angry about it because he's doing essential work), his urbane friend Tareq (Sudan-born Alexander Siddig) steps in to act as guide.

Where the city (like any city) can be strange and even menacing, Tareq shows her a side to Cairo that is warm and inviting; qualities Juliette eventually ascribes to Tareq himself. Juliette initially suggests Tareq is destined to hook up with a lost love he meets while picking up Juliette at the airport. But she clearly entertains the notion of a hook-up that might be more personally fulfilling.

The film appears to be set up as a tale of forbidden love, but Nadda is Canadian and resists a slide into that particular cliché. Instead, she relies on subtlety in presenting the sublimated attraction brewing between these two opposites.

Siddig is, as required, as charismatic a presence as Cairo, a city Nadda shoots in loving detail (though not always to its advantage).

But it is Clarkson, truly one of the loveliest actresses in contemporary cinema, who owns the screen.

She gives a wholly mature performance suggesting a passion that is no less inclined to smoke, just because it's on the back burner.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition October 16, 2009 D6

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