How Cairo gave her groove back: Cairo Time is a middle-age libido fantasy

New York mag editor Juliette (Patricia Clarkson) travels alone to Cairo to meet her husband, who works for the United Nations in Gaza. When hubby gets stuck across the border indefinitely due to vague unrest, Tareq (Alexander Siddig), his former bodyguard, steps in as Juliette’s chaperone. Fluent in English and supposedly highly literate, Tareq actually says things like “They say once you have drunk the water of the Nile, you always come back,” to which Juliette purrs, “Here’s to coming back” — a not-so-subtle reference to her own groove.

A seductive (yet chaste) exotic-man-reinvigorates-middle-aged-wife’s-libido fantasy, Cairo Time spends a lot of screen time putting Clarkson in contrived situations to hammer home the culture-shock theme. Would a real journalist be so naive as to not understand that her body — identifiably Western and comparatively exposed — would draw unwelcome attention to itself on the streets of a Muslim country? Juliette’s Stupid Tourist episodes lead to loneliness, frustration and humiliation, which in turn prompt her to seek out Tareq, who is seemingly always up for long walks and longer conversations — think Before Sunset, weighed down by awkward articulation of the central couple’s cultural differences. Happily, writer/director Ruba Nadda’s emphasis on body language ultimately trumps the clumsiness of her script. Intimate lensing turns tiny gestures — a hand on the small of a back, a friendly kiss that misses its target — into major landmarks, and chemistry between the two leads sustains the movie’s jet-lagged, heat-dazed spell. When fifty-year-old Clarkson nervously steps back to bask in Tareq’s adoration, she blushes like a teenage girl with her first crush.