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The relationship between art and power—and, more specifically, cinema and power—is the subject of “Eagles of the Republic,” showing in competition. Tarik Saleh, who wrote and directed, won the festival’s screenplay prize in 2022 for “Cairo Conspiracy,” then titled “Boy From Heaven.”
The actor Fares Fares, who in “Cairo Conspiracy” played a shadowy colonel who recruited students as informers, has this time been cast in the virtual opposite of that role: Here, he plays a heartthrob, a movie star named George Fahmy (and nicknamed “the pharaoh of the screen”). When we meet George, he seems to be doing all right for himself, despite an argument with the censors over the kissing scene that kicks off the movie.
Separated from his wife (Donia Massoud), George has a mistress (Lyna Khoudri) the same age as his college student son. His high profile makes him recognizable everywhere, which leads to an awkward interaction when he needs to purchase Viagra from the pharmacy, as the film demonstrates in its funniest scene.
More pressingly, George’s celebrity gets him strong-armed into playing Egypt’s president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, in a biopic. El-Sisi, who took power in a military coup in 2013, is not exactly George’s favorite person, but the film charts the star’s seduction into collaboration, which comes with perks. George can ask for a “mistake”—the arrest of a neighbor’s son, say—to be corrected. He can request a reprieve for an actress colleague (Cherien Dabis) who seems to have been blacklisted, although in that case there are strings attached.
He jeopardizes his new clout, though, by launching into a fling with the wife (Zineb Triki) of the defense minister who hovers over the production. “Eagles of the Republic” has some of the texture of a ’70s paranoid thriller in which obscure forces amass on all sides around the protagonist. As a director, Saleh is mostly workmanlike, and as a writer, he could stand to sharpen his densely plotted script. But there’s a chilling irony in the film’s upshot: George learns that authoritarians get final cut not only in the movies they produce, but also in life.
The tradeoffs of filmmaking in the Middle East also figure prominently in “Once Upon a Time in Gaza,” directed by the brothers Tarzan and Arab Nasser and showing in Un Certain Regard. Despite the obvious topicality suggested by the title—and an opening excerpt of Donald Trump’s remarks from February about Gaza being remade as a riviera—the movie, set in Gaza but filmed in Jordan, is actually a period piece, in two main parts.
The first half takes place in 2007 and follows Osama (Majd Eid), who we meet trying to persuade a doctor to give him unneeded drugs (and furtively swiping the doc’s prescription pad). Osama is a drug dealer, selling pills hidden in falafels prepared by Yahya (Nader Abd Alhay).
A year or two later, in a strand that initially seems like a separate story, Yahya is approached by the director of the enclave’s Hamas-run culture ministry. The stranger wants to cast him in “the first action movie made in Gaza.” The prospects for a Gazan film industry—“Gazawood,” per one character’s coinage—are dubious, in part because the noise from violence on set has an uncanny way of starting real attacks.
But that concept may give you a sense of the film’s exceedingly dark sense of humor, which lands somewhere between Quentin Tarantino and Quentin Dupieux. The title, which evokes the revenge plots in Sergio Leone’s westerns, ties in with Yahya’s desire to square things with a cop (Ramzi Maqdisi) who wronged Osama. Structurally, “Once Upon a Time in Gaza” is pretty rough (the two halves aren’t tied together well), but the lurching, unpredictable nature of the narrative is of a piece with the movie’s subject and setting.
from Roger Ebert https://ift.tt/LuWydKz
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