In the Last Days of the City

Tamer El Said’s slow and meandering but ultimately affecting film has literally been 10 years in the making, with much of it shot in Cairo in 2009, as resistance to the regime of Hosni Mubarek was just beginning to build. Khalid (Khalid Abdalla) is a documentarian attempting to shoot an impressionistic portrait of the Egyptian capital, who infuriates his editor due to his inability to decide what to include. Khalid commiserates with colleagues from Beirut and Baghdad who love their cities yet also feel estranged because of their radical and violent contemporary transformations. Khalid must also deal with changes occurring in his personal life: his girlfriend has left him and is preparing to leave the country; his mother is in the hospital, perhaps dying; and he must vacate his apartment but vacillates about choosing another while he is driven around the city listening to government broadcasts as the regime is starting to totter and society lurches toward Islamic fundamentalism. Khalid’s mood is mirrored in others, including a friend who reminiscences ruefully about her idyllic childhood in Alexandria. The portrait that emerges of a city—and a life—spinning slowly out of control is now inevitably viewed through the prism of what has happened in Egypt over the last decade, deepening the mood of quiet anxiety that pervades this film that is both a melancholy elegy to a particular place and a moving rumination on the inevitability of change. Recommended. (F. Swietek)