From films such as István Szabó’s 1981 Mephisto to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Veronika Voss from 1982, we all know that no good comes to artists who chose to bend the knee to fascist powerbrokers. What may initially seem like a clever play for patriotic credo always leads to disaster when the political high-ups inevitably come tumbling down from their gilded perch.
Egyptian filmmaker Tarik Saleh closes off a trilogy of films exploring high-level corruption in his homeland (preceded by 2017’s The Nile Hilton Incident and 2022’s Cairo Conspiracy), with a glossy portrait of a modern screen icon whose own cultural dominance is forcibly leveraged by the ruling party, and suddenly his lofty image of progressive artistic excellence is transformed into something else entirely.
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Leading man Fares Fares delivers a commanding and charismatic performance as George Fahmy, known in Egypt as “The Pharaoh of the Screen” and whose face adorns movie posters, murals and social media feeds up and down his country. Indeed, the film draws numerous allusions to ancient times with its city penthouses framed as modern pyramids and the ruling class as untouchable elites with the power of life or death.
George is also the bane of the fundamentalist all-female censorship board with his sexually suggestive and amoral movies (one of which includes The First Egyptian on the Moon), and his off-screen, Stella Artois-quaffing hi-jinx sits him somewhere between a cad and a rotter, with a son from a wife who he is now separated from and young mistresses in apartments all over town who all want to get ahead in the movie business.
With the world apparently at his feed, George suddenly finds himself smack-dab in the middle of an ethical minefield, when goon-like government officials simply insist that he not only accept a role in a bloated hagiography of sitting (since 2014) Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sissi, but also deliver a rousing keynote speech at an upcoming military parade on the anniversary of the 2013 revolution/coup d’etat (delete as applicable) which ensconced Al-Sissi in power.
It’s a sticky wicket for sure, but the supremely confident George feels that his level of celebrity is such that he’ll come out of all this smelling of roses, and with a fat paycheque from his dubious, bureaucratically top-heavy paymasters. The presence of a person known as Dr. Mansour (Amr Waked) on set who seems to be pulling the strings of the avatar director, sets up the first of many dark players on our hero’s increasingly dicey journey into the unknown.
Initially, Saleh’s film suggests itself as a gaudy ensemble satire that hits its fish-in-barrel targets with amiable precision. The idea of a film production that’s being made by committee perhaps transcends the context behind this story and could be a stand-in for the majority of big studio productions across the globe. Yet the film pivots awkwardly into political thriller territory, as shady government enforcers are very quick to prove that they have ways of making you act.
It’s a slick and fitfully amusing affair that never quite penetrates deeper than the surface in its broad critique of the uncomfortable intersections between culture and state. George has his agency and power drained from him, and the film duly loses interest as he becomes little more than a handsomely turned-out tumbleweed in the winds of unscrupulous power.
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