Pyramid scheme

Cairo Time

Crit

Let's talk about sexual tension. 'Cause see, the movies are all about letting us experience vicariously all sorts of experiences we'll never have the opportunity to experience in real life. But sexual tension--that painful, hopeful sense that things are going in a certain direction, but the uncertainty about how far in that direction things will go, whether they'll go all the way--is something we all have experienced once or twice or a thousand times, and something the movies rarely give us.

Oh, Fred's character may not know whether he'll get to dance cheek-to-cheek with Ginger's character after the final reel, but it's always obvious to us. This is one realm in which real life will almost always be more suspenseful than reel life. Which is one reason why this is one of my favorite films in a long while. There's no denying that Juliette (My Future Wife Patricia Clarkson, in one of the finest [in every sense] performances of her career) and Tariq (the Sudanese-born Alexander Siddig) are having a "romance," but given that she sincerely loves her husband (a UN official whose duties are keeping him from joining her on her first trip to Cairo), and so does his friend and former colleague Tariq, they have every reason to resist the urge they share. At one point Tariq draws near, and Juliette pulls away . . . then draws closer . . . then says, with excruciating ambiguity, "Let's go."

Another thing that makes the film special is that Ruba Nadda (who has directed nothing else I've ever heard of, though I must say the short I Would Suffer Cold Hands over You sounds intriguing) knows what a treasure she has in the faces of her leads. I've pretty much decided that MFW Patty's face is the best in the movies today, and Siddig's is not too shabby for a guy's. Nadda regularly lets each act quietly with his or her face alone, and those faces say as much as any words could.

A beautiful, heart-wrenching gem of a film.