Told in less than ninety minutes of loosely connected vignettes, the Chelsea Theater bills this little movie as “a love letter to a city intertwined with a love story about a woman.”
More accurate would be “a love letter to a city that’s barely present rudely suffocated by an abortive love story about an uninteresting woman that begins prematurely and ends unconvincingly.”
“Mrs. Juliette” (a sour-faced Patricia Clarkson) is a glamour magazine editor married to a U.N. diplomat to Gaza. Her husband, unable to make their appointed holiday rendezvous in Cairo, sends his retired Egyptian colleague (Alexander Siddig) to show her around the city.
As the exotic insider helps Juliette out of her predictable cultural faux-pas, they “fall in love” — or so we’re asked to believe by the way they bat their eyes at each other – and wind up with an unconsummated affair that we might expect to smolder in their hearts forever, if we had much reason to keep thinking about them once we left the theater. We can forget about them, however, just as fast as they fell in love: in record time.
It’s a bland, unchallenging story that might have been rescued by a strong cinematic vision. And at first, “Cairo Time” does have some beautifully textured shots of the city. They quickly dissolve, however, into an obstinate refusal to look into tough angles or compromising places. There isn’t a slum to be seen in the whole movie, and Israeli-Palestinian relations are a herd of stampeding elephants in the room.
Most obnoxious though is Juliette’s total ignorance of gender politics in Cairo, unbelievable for a diplomat’s wife. There are certain things the movies can ask us to believe, but this is not one of them. In the end, she’s an impulsive and stupid character, and it’s hard to sympathize with her love for a city she clearly doesn’t understand and a man she can’t possibly love.
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