EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC is my first Tarik Saleh film. I knew nothing about the film or the director when I saw it yesterday. But I returned home so elated from the film that I looked him up, found that the film is the third in a trilogy; and promptly ordered the other two: BOY FROM HEAVEN/ (AKA CAIRO CONSPIRACY, 2002) and THE NILE HILTON INCIDENT, 2017) all starring Fares Fares. What gave me so much pleasure initially was the mise-en-scène. It’s not just every frame a painting, but every shot beautiful to look at, expressive, feeling direct and propulsive, but conveying various things at once. Saleh takes my least favourite shot in contemporary cinema, a steadycam following the protagonist from the back, and makes it tense, sad, poetic. Here the camera is focussed on the neck, like the protagonist is a target, in front of him everything is out of focus, unclear, dangerous, difficult to manoeuvre, entrapping. And that’s just one example. It’s like reading a novel and finding a beautiful sentence one wants to underline, to return to and savour. If one could underline passages in films, this one would be full of ink.
The film is about state corruption and about how even the most powerful artists are limited in the ways they can resist it. Here Egypt’s most famous actor George Fahmy (Fares Fares) is asked to star in a biopic of Egypt’s real-life authoritarian President (Abdel Fattah el-Sisi). He initially and very tactfully refuses but then finds he’s lost his trailer at the studio, his next film’s been given to another actor, his favourite co-star has been blacklisted, and, the clincher, something might happen to his son if he doesn’t. So he does. It’s a world in which, as one character says, ‘principles are like AIDS’. And yet he can’t stop being himself; an artist who even forced to act against his will can’t stop trying to make the dreck better, more truthful, more entertaining. He also can’t stop himself from chasing women, even the most powerful general’s wife, and hopping from frying pans to fires. The film’s achievement is to evoke the arbitrary deadlyness of authoritarianism — it can destroy your life when least expected, at someone else’s will for the most minor reason — whilst doing so with a light hand: it’s a funny, sexy, film. The deadly authoritarianism is what people live under but people are still humans looking for sex, love, a laugh, a solution to particular circumstances, all the while knowing that a mere word, overheard or mis-interpreted by the powerful, can alter or end one’s life.
EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC is also a cinephile film, in love with Egyptian film history, and also cleverly citing a broader cinematic culture (from Antonioni to De Mille, via Riefenstahl). Saleh is the son of an Egyptian immigrant and a Swedish mother, who was himself forced to flee Egypt in 2015, just as he was about to begin filming THE NILE HILTON INCIDENT. EAGLES OF THE REPUBLIC is a film that couldn’t be made in Egypt. It’s also a film that couldn’t be made in the US today (and Trump’s America is ripe for such filming if people weren’t so afraid). At a time where being famous is seen as a superpower, the film tells us that even superpowers have their limitations. At the end of the film, George has survived and is gambling with people next to some rubble on the outskirts of Cairo. But his co-star has been killed for not wanting to offer sexual favours to generals, his manager tortured and executed for being gay, he’s survived an attempted coup, exchanged his principles for the life of his son. If as the film says, citing Becket, ‘words are the clothes thoughts wear’, the film’s Egypt is a place where you have to be super-careful about your wardrobe.
It’s a thrilling film to see; and an important one. It was nominated for the Palme D’or and won all kinds of Swedish Film Awards. I was sad to be the only person in the audience watching it; and there’s perhaps more to say about how films have lost their place in the cultural conversation. But that will have to wait for another time.
Jose Arroyo