Cairo Time

Cairo Time I think is about how one defines fidelity in a relationship, especially when one is in a situation that is out of place of what one has been used to.  Patricia Clarkson plays Juliette, who is a writer in a women's magazine (the Glamour or Vogue type) who comes to meet up with her husband who works at the U.N., but he is delayed in the Gaza area so she is on her own for a few days in Cairo. He has asked an old colleague, Tareq (Alexander Siddig) to drive her to the hotel and set her up there. Tareq runs into an old girlfriend at the airport who invites them to her daughter's upcoming wedding. He is retired already despite being youngish (younger than Juliette at least) and now runs a men's only traditional coffee hangout, so for the most part he can come and go as he pleases.

At first Juliette is at sea trying to fill up her day without being bored. Here, her identity is not as an independent woman, but "the wife" and finds she is expected to conform to those boundaries.  She attends a consulate function by herself and meets another of her husband's colleagues, Kathryn (Elena Anaya) who invites her for a daytrip to meet her family out in the desert. The two talk a bit about following the men in their relationships. Later Juliette rashly decides to take a bus to Gaza alone, and during a tense checkpoint, she is advised to return to the city (she's the only Westerner on the bus, and one of the few women). During this ride she befriends a young woman who asks her to do a dangerous favor, which Juliette consults Tareq on.

Every now and again Tareq either comes to meet Juliette to take her about the city, or she seeks him out at his coffee shop and they spend the day together, even staying out very late and coming back to the hotel at dawn, or she even becomes a bit more daring and ventures out on her own a bit. These meetings are usually unplanned. Of course they end up attending that wedding, which leads Juliette to consider what she wants, just when her husband returns to her.


Patricia Clarkson as expected was the draw to this film. There is some of that glamorous travel view like in a lot of movies, but they are more of backdrop than a promotional video. Even the pyramids/Sphinx are not obvious landmarks for a Western audience, they are mostly there because of the significance to Clarkson's character. Siddig as Tareq has a quiet aristocratic air that reminds me of Alec Guinness in The Swan, someone who kind of knows his place in the world and yet still politely resigned to work with it.

Although scenes with Kathryn and the young woman on the bus (and even encounters with the hotel maid and a man in a shoe shop) help to fill out or introduce some of the issues in the Middle East (women's issues and cultural differences) to Juliette, they are not exactly unknown issues to an globally-educated Western audience, and I thought that Juliette, especially being the wife of someone who works in the sort of job where knowing about the different parts of the world and its customs, seemed quite naive in this respect. At no time is she a bleeding heart type of person, but neither is she a no-hands-on person when it comes to reacting to the local issues.

At the end of the film though, I was debating whether to consider her fidelity gone. I think, depending on how you personally view it, the film kind of leaves her faithfulness at the end up to you to decide. It hovers just below crossing a line to a more definite answer.