Review: Cairo Conspiracy / Boy From Heaven

Cairo Conspiracy / Boy From Heaven
Cert: 12A / 121 mins / Dir. Tarik Saleh / Trailer

Okay, what the fuck was all that about? This is what happens when A Movie Reviewer finds himself in front of A Film which he's barely qualified to even watch, let alone cast opinion upon, but has committed to write about everything either way...

Cairo Conspiracy*¹ is a contemporary Arabic-language political thriller, in which Adam (Tawfeek Barhom) is the son of a rural fisherman who is awarded a place in Cairo's Al-Azhar University, only find himself inadvertently recruited by Colonel Ibrahim (Fares Fares*²) into the underhand State Security forces, when political unrest threatens to boil over surrounding the election/appointment of a new Grand Imam. Absolute hell on.

CURRENT

So, not being an area of current affairs I'm familiar with I wasn't particularly invested in the plot going into Cairo Conspiracy, and director Tarik Saleh subsequently did nothing to change that. Truth be told this is more a treatise in fragile masculinity than global politics, although it also goes without saying that the line between those two grows more fuzzy year by year.

This is, by necessity, a fiddly and very 'wordy' storyline; not too complex to follow in and of itself, but the sheer velocity of the script dictates that each subtitle card appears on-screen for an absolute bare minimum of time before the next. In a test for fidgeters, look away and you'll be lost. Worse than this though, the story itself takes place over Adam's entire university career; with such a chronological span to cover in relatively few locations, Saleh often gives us the passage of entire days indicated by a two second smash-cut to another area*³, then cutting immediately back to where we were (and mostly with the characters wearing exactly the same clothes*⁴). The pacing here is exhausting, and there has rarely been a film where the viewer's rapt attention on the screen has been more vital to following what's actually going on.

CHELSEA

The ambiguity of the characters' motivations is well handled, but this also means there's little-to-no bonding between the audience and the players (even yer main lad gets the backstory scenes and still feels like hard work). While I mostly followed the plot (certainly the large story-markers, although I'm bound to have missed smaller intricacies), I confess I really struggled to care about any of it. The whole thing hares along its runtime with almost no emotional luggage, until the final act where the empathetical-crowbar comes out of Saleh's toolbox, although by then it's really too little too late. It's difficult to empathise after two hours of watching socially repressed characters being awful for reasons they can't and won't explain.

But like I said, this wasn't made with me in mind. Truth be told, if this had been called Papal Perfidiousness and was about behind-the-scenes skullduggery and fallout when the Vatican was selecting a new Pope, I wouldn't have been bothered about that either.

Far greater minds than mine will get far more out of this, but don't say I didn't warn you...

*¹ Yeah it's not a particularly great title, although the original Boy From Heaven is even worse. At least they're trying to create a bit of intrigue with the US and UK release, I suppose. ^{[ BACK ]}

*² Tell me this isn't Bradley Cooper going deep undercover to clean up at the next awards-season. ^{[ BACK ]}

*³ In all honesty, the only reason for an edit as brutal as this is if the raw workprint of the film was around two weeks long. ^{[ BACK ]}

*⁴ Seriously though, is a dedicated Islamic university going to be okay with one of its students slobbing around in a Morbid Angel t-shirt (this actual one) every night in the dorm? Okay, the university itself isn't run by strict fundamentalists (although they certainly have a presence there), and okay Morbid Angel are pantomime Satanists one step below Cradle Of Filth, but still. Appearances, y'know? I just get the feeling something would be said at what is very much A Faith School that's shown to be kinda straight-laced in pretty much every other area. ^{[ BACK ]}

DISCLAIMERS:
• ^^^ That's dry, British humour, and most likely sarcasm or facetiousness.
• Yen's blog contains harsh language and even harsher notions of propriety. Reader discretion is advised.
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