How bad are things in Egypt, as far as freedom of expression is concerned? So bad that the Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro of Egyptian cinema, so to speak, actually live and work in, um, Sweden.
The situation is a bit more complicated than that absolutely factually accurate statement indicated. Tarik Saleh, the writer and director of the roller-coaster political thriller “Eagles of the Republic,” lives full-time in Sweden in part because his mother is Swedish. He was, in fact, born in the country. Born in Lebanon, the actor Fares Fares, who stars in all three of Saleh’s films in his “Cairo Trilogy,” moved to Sweden to escape the Lebanese Civil War. In 2017’s “The Nile Hilton Incident,” Fares played a corrupt police detective who develops a sense of justice at an inopportune time; the film implies that in contemporary Egypt, it’s always an inopportune time for such things. In “Cairo Conspiracy,” also known as “Boy From Heaven,” he plays a corrupt military man who corrupts an innocent student while trying to fix an election.
In Saleh’s new film, Fares plays George Fahmy, a coddled Egyptian movie star—one of his biggest hits is a picture called “First Egyptian in Space”—whose primary interest in life is in staying coddled.
Watching him lounging around at home in his silk pajamas, enjoying the attentions of his gorgeous mistress, you can see why he doesn’t want much change in his life. But the roiling politics of his country, including aggressive cultural demands from Islamic factions, are impinging on his comfort. “You and your degenerate friends have plunged your country into the mud,” a female committee informs him after he’s overheard making a sarcastic, possibly sacrilegious remark. Soon, his trailer as Unlimited Media Studios has been towed off the lot, and his shoots are haunted by a mustachioed observer, Mahmoud, who advises him, “I advise you to be very careful when you talk about the President.”
The movie’s scenario resembles that of Milan Kundera’s immortal novel of cultural repression, “The Joke,” in which a private jape turns a young Czech student’s life upside down. But here things get a lot more immediately perilous for George, as an attempted assassination puts him in the vicinity of real and violent death, and near the end of the picture, his adult son is kidnapped. If the movie’s conclusion is more along the lines of Voltaire than it is to, say, Costa-Gavras’ “Z,” the hair-raising route it takes to get George to a spot of tentative complacency is memorable and eye-opening.
