By Dimitri
Keramitas
Cairo Confidential (also titled The Nile Hilton Incident) is an Arabic-language, Egypt-set movie,
but made with Northern European funding. This may provide an explanation for
the production values Swedish director Tarik Saleh was able to give his work.
Even at its most grotty, this film noir has the elegance and assurance of a top-budget movie.
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| A poster of the film in France. |
The film also
melds crime and punishment with politics, and so we might wonder how close to
Officer
Noredin Mostafa (wonderfully played by Fares Fares) is a mid-level plainclothes
cop. In classic noir tradition, he’s a widower living a spare lifestyle which
does not exclude alcohol, cigarettes and the occasional joint of kif.
He’s
assigned to look into a murder, the kind of sordid crime he should be used to.
Perhaps because he lost his wife, he gives the case of a murdered woman more
than his usual attention. It takes him through a complicated investigation with
many lethal twists - and the viewer on a dizzying tour of the underside of
Cairo. The director’s dark vision and the quality with which it’s expressed
recall the novelist James Elroy (and film adaptations of his work) at his best.
The director,
of Egyptian descent but born in Stockholm, has a feel for contemporary Egypt
and its people. Saleh also has a background in the visual arts, including
animation. Paradoxically, this sensibility enables him to make details resonate
not just as aesthetic motifs but as reality that is both social and emotional.
Whether his outsider status, and that of the production in general, distorts
that reality is a question that’s difficult to answer, but should be
considered.
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| Sudanese model Mari Malek plays a hotel worker in Cairo Confidential. |
Cairo Confidential (winner of the Sundance Film Festival’s
World Cinema Grand Jury Prize) is a film noir in the most literal sense, almost
exclusively shot in dark hues via street lighting, indoor lights, or natural
twilight. The effect is as handsome as it is forbidding - you want to join the
habitués in a café and puff on a nargileh.
The vision of
Egyptian society is one of poverty but also the teeming energy of a people kept
from emerging from that poverty by a darkness that is more than physical - and
by the bonds that stifle. The bonds are political, but also social, even
familial. Just as the darkness has its romantic side, so the stress on family
gives the story a strangely intimate flavour.
As long as
the case stays within the seedy depths of Cairo - petty criminals, fences,
shady barmen, entertainers moonlighting as prostitutes - Noredin can rely on
his “family” of fellow policemen. In a milieu where official salaries are low,
and rules need to be bent, complicity is taken for granted.
But then one
of the nightclub entertainers turns out to have a higher profile than expected,
and a person of interest turns out to be a rich industrialist. Noredin needs
the protection of his superior, a high-level inspector who happens to be his
uncle Kammal (Yasser Ali Maher). The uncle assures him that he has his back,
and so Noredin digs deeper.
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| A scene from the film. |
The story
will take us to the upper levels of Egyptian society, but also to the hidden
world of African migrants, including hotel worker Salwa, played by Mari Malek,
a former refugee from Sudan who is now a top model, DJ and actress in the
United States. It also takes us into Noredin’s darkly romantic heart, when he
gets involved with the nightclub singer, Gina (Hania Amar). All the actors in
Cairo Confidential are convincing, their authenticity etched in the acid bath
of corruption. But Fares Fares stands out for his rendition of one supremely
complex cop - dogged, melancholic, tough, smart, fair but also corrupt.
The deeper
the obsessed Noredin gets into his case, the closer it gets to the Power.
Ironically, the time-line creeps closer and closer to the Tahrir Square
Revolution, the Power’s end. Noredin himself, whatever his intentions, can
hardly claim to be divorced from the Power’s perfidy and its consequences: it’s
all in the family. But, as we in the audience know, it’s not really the end of
the Power. Although our hero gets battered as much as Sam Spade or Phillip
Marlow, and threatened with much worse, he will probably live to see another
bribe. Who says there are no more Happy Endings?
Production:
Atmo Production/Chimney/Copenhagen Film Fund. Distribution: Memento Films
(France), Strand Releasing (USA)
Dimitri
Keramitas is an award-winning writer and legal expert based in Paris.
