A sumptuous drama in serious need of some passion
Luxor 12A cert, 85 min
Director Zeina Durra
Starring Andrea Riseborough, Karim Saleh, Michael Landes
Atour guide at the Temple of Ramses III, on the bank of the Nile, directs the attention of her group to a battle frieze marking the pharaoh’s victory over the Sea Peoples in 1178BC. “What this represents for us is our own inner demons,” she extrapolates. Hearing this, an Englishwoman on her own, slight and blonde, with a pale blue baseball cap, steps forward to contemplate this mass of faded relief, which fills the frame except for her own dwarfed figure.
This is Hana (Andrea Riseborough), and we deduce from the shot that the inner demon thing strikes some serious chords with her. She’s holidaying in Luxor, staying in five-star luxury at the Winter Palace Hotel, having recently finished a stint of aid work in the Middle East. The film is reticent about both her romantic past and professional life – we’re reminded she’s a doctor when a fellow tourist collapses from heat exhaustion, and she intervenes.
What we do know is that, once, she was in love with Sultan (Karim Saleh), a handsome archaeologist who happens to be in Egypt on a dig and spots her, to his delight, on the cross-nile ferry one day. They arrange to spend some time together, and while the conversations leave important things unbroached, we watch the slow rekindling of something between them.
It’s slow, because Hana is such a mysteriously sad, solitary person, who seems to be hiding herself away from Sultan, the audience, and everyone else. At least she’s picked a sightseeing destination – with all of its ranged columns and stony burial chambers – that makes hiding quite straightforward. The writer-director, Zeina Durra, dispenses nuggets of history at each site the pair visit, having them shoot the breeze with local acquaintances. We’re asked to intuit things about the ruins of a civilisation and the secret recesses of Hana’s soul, but unfortunately a complete character never shows up.
In a rare moment of comic friction, a hotel employee ticks Sultan off for swimming in his boxers. The scene stands out more than it should, an intrusive splash of life in still waters. Available on Curzon Home Cinema from today