In the Last Days of the City
IN THE LAST DAYS OF THE CITY, drama, not rated, in Arabic with subtitles, Jean Cocteau Cinema, 3 chiles
In one scene from In the Last Days of the City, four Arab filmmaker friends reunite amidst the bustle of Cairo and discuss their lives, their cities (three of them are visiting from Berlin, Baghdad, and Beirut), and their craft. “Cairo has such images,” Bassem (Bassem Fayad) says. “No other city offers so many images, one after the other. Twenty thousand per second. But if you stay a while —”
Khalid (Khalid Abdalla) finishes his thought: “You stop seeing.” Khalid, the film’s protagonist, is the only member of the quartet who lives in Cairo. He spends his time editing his current project, looking for a new apartment in the city, tending to the embers of a romance with his girlfriend (Laila Samy) before she moves away, and visiting his dying mother (Zeinab Mostafa) in the hospital. It is a transitional time for him, and also for the region — it’s 2009, the Arab Spring is around the corner, and the airwaves and streets are abuzz with news of political change. Khalid is anxious; perhaps he’s stayed in Cairo too long to see the images around him.
There is no such concern with Egyptian director Tamer El Said, who helms the movie with a painstaking and persistent eye for detail. People who briefly appear on the sidewalks — such as an older man blowing bubbles — lodge in viewers’ brains before reappearing later. In one night scene, Khalid notices naked mannequins behind a window. The next day, their midsections are blocked by newspaper pages, a sign of the country’s hard shift to Islam. A few days later, the same mannequins are clothed.
It can be a cliché to call a city the star of a film, but in this instance, it’s apt — both because of the undercooked characters, and the loving way El Said portrays Cairo, a unique urban center colored by the lovely, dusty beiges and browns of the desert. It contains commotion that North American hubs such as New York City can’t even compare to, as if life spreads to fill every square inch. Buildings of brick and concrete are stacked in seemingly random ways, as old-world sophistication mixes seamlessly with the hardscrabble resourcefulness of a place steeped in poverty.
And yet El Said shows a cosmopolitan side of Cairo that is not dissimilar to Woody Allen’s Manhattan, with a plot that bears some thematic resemblance to the musical Rent, as bohemians struggle to find places to live and express themselves while forces beyond their control constrict them. Khalid and his friends don’t bring viewers through a plot so much as they simply exist on the precipice of upheaval. Nonetheless, it is bracing to spend time with people who are passionate, who think in metaphor and speak in poetry, and who care deeply about the places they are from. — Robert Ker Metropolis