Zeina Durra (2020)

Hana (Andrea Riseborough), a British doctor, arrives in Luxor for a break between stints in her international aid work.  She’s recently been on the Lebanon-Syria border; her next assignment could be in Yemen.  She books into the Winter Palace hotel.  The first night she’s there, Carl (Michael Landes), a boring, brazen American tourist, tries to chat her up in the bar, and succeeds in getting her in his bed.  She quietly escapes from his room next morning and takes care to avoid him thereafter.  Hana, who has been in Luxor before, spends the first part of her stay mostly alone.  Drifting round the place and its ancient monuments, she appears to be going through the tourist motions.  At the same time, as she runs her fingers over hieroglyphics on a temple wall, she seems to be trying to rediscover something.  On a boat trip, Hana bumps into Sultan (Karim Saleh), an old flame, and they start spending time together.

As soon as she sits down in her room on arrival at the Winter Palace, Hana looks weary and defeated.  (You suspect she sleeps with Carl because she hasn’t the energy to refuse.)  Although reticent about her work, she says enough in the course of Luxor to make clear that experiences in the field are the main cause of her exhaustion.  She tells Sultan she’s seen things no one should have to see.  Yet she also asks her ex-lover if he doesn’t miss ‘how hopeful we were’.  The heedlessness of youth that she regrets is something Sultan (who, like Hana, is about forty) seems to have retained rather more of, evidenced in occasional displays of extrovert humour.  His nostalgia – or preparation for nostalgia – is simpler, too, as he waxes lyrical about the faded grandeur of the Winter Palace and ruefully anticipates a forthcoming refurb.  Hana’s only burst of extroversion comes in the hotel bar, where she and Sultan have been drinking.  The lounge pianist plays a number that launches her into an almost frenzied solo dance.  Afterwards, for the only time in the film, she collapses in tears as Sultan guides her back to her room.

Hana and Sultan are nicely contrasted revenants to Luxor, and the two actors’ physical qualities reinforce the contrast.  Sultan is a westernised Egyptian – an archaeologist now based in America who regularly returns to his native land on excavations there.  Swarthy, strong-featured Karim Saleh gives a good sense of a man comfortable in his own skin and genially shallow until the continuing company of Hana nudges him towards recognising her deeper feelings and becoming himself more reflective.  Andrea Riseborough, with her pale hair and eyes and limber slenderness, is a foreign body in the heat and dust of Luxor, as well as ill at ease with herself.

While Sultan is cheerfully disengaged from the religious traditions of the culture he grew up in, Hana’s attitude towards the metaphysical is more volatile and hard to get a handle on.  After coming to the aid of a woman tourist who faints in the heat, Hana is accosted by the leader of the woman’s party, who has a determinedly spiritual agenda for their time in Egypt.  Hana finds this alienating but is more responsive to Salima (Salima Ikram), a senior archaeologist on Sultan’s dig, when she asserts that places of great antiquity can be imbued with the intensity of human feeling invested in them over many centuries.  Later, though, as Hana and Sultan dine with the other archaeologists, her mood plummets as Salina describes an unusually plausible case of alleged reincarnation.  It may well be this is an attack of the PTSD from which Hana seems to be suffering but the coincidence of dismay and more-things-in-heaven-and-earth talk is striking.

Hana herself isn’t averse to gnomic spiritual insights, however.  She announces that the more unstable things are, the more the supernatural comes to the fore:  it’s frustrating that her interlocutor doesn’t ask what she means.  When she says to Sultan, ‘I’ve heard this thing:  the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born – now is the time of monsters’, he asks whose words these are but Hana laughs that she’s forgotten.  (They were Gramsci’s and have added relevance if you watch Luxor, as I did, in between reading news reports of Trump’s law suits in the light of the US presidential election.)   In the closing stages of the film, the hotel manager Dunia (Shirin Redha), who likes Hana and realises she’s struggling, takes her to see a wise woman.  This old lady says prayers, feels Hana’s hat and withdraws to intuit what her visitor needs to know – Dunia warns that the wait for this could take all night.  Hana falls asleep and has one of those dreams, more common on screen than in life, in which significant details of recent experience are woven into an elegantly suggestive whole.  While she’s sleeping, the shaman briefly reappears but Hana and Dunia leave without, it seems, further conversation with the old woman.  On the journey back to Luxor, their car gets a flat tyre.  While the chauffeur changes it, Hana stands at the roadside looking into the beautifully uncommunicative sky of stars.

Writer-director Zeina Durra, now in her mid-forties, was born in London to a Bosnian-Palestinian mother and a Jordanian-Lebanese father.  This is her second feature, ten years after the first (The Imperialists Are Still Alive!, a romantic drama set in Manhattan but chiefly concerned with Middle East politics).  Durra, with her cinematographer, Zelma Gainza, has made a film that’s visually and atmospherically strong.  Andrea Riseborough’s thoughtful yet dissociated presence gives Luxor an individuality that ensures it comes over as a character rather than a case study.  But it’s one that doesn’t develop much.  Durra divides the narrative into chapters, with headings that name-check an eclectic collection of people (Freud, The Grateful Dead, Bob Marley) yet the film’s parts don’t amount to much more than a series of illustrations of how Hana is feeling.

When Sultan first sees her on the boat, he asks Hana what she’s doing in Luxor.  She answers, ‘I’m on a date’ and, when he looks puzzled, laughs embarrassedly, ‘I mean I’m on leave’.  The Freudian slip is revealing of more than how Hana still feels about Sultan (she later admits to dreading seeing him, on Facebook, ‘on a beach, in Dubai, with kids’).  It also reflects the viewer’s primary means of staying engaged with Durra’s film.  By the time she meets Sultan, it’s already pretty clear that Hana’s solitary walks around the ruins will, in terms of what’s going on inside her head, be an unresolved mystery tour.  Hopes are therefore pinned on her love life to maintain interest in the story.  It takes time for Hana and Sultan to have sex together again; his disappearance for most of the last part of Luxor makes you wonder if it will end simply with Hana checking out of the Winter Palace, as it began with her checking in.  She does, indeed, leave the hotel but doesn’t head for the airport.  Her taxi takes Hana instead to the modest place where Sultan is staying.

The leader of the party including the fainting woman urged Hana to accompany them on their trip to the town of Abydos, stressing the spiritual power of the place.  Hana declined the offer, of course.  Later, she claims not to remember going to Abydos with Sultan when they were lovers years ago.  At the last, she changes her mind about the place.  When Sultan says, ‘Let’s go to Abydos’, she replies, ‘That’s just what I was thinking’.  This is Luxor‘s closing line and its closing shot is an image of what is presumably Abydos.  Durra has told the Arab Times that her film ‘is about [Hana], and it’s about [Sultan] creating this opportunity for her to look back at her choices … He doesn’t save her.  She saves herself.  His presence is just an opportunity for her to think about how she wants to live again’.  That sounds emotionally complicated but what’s finally likeable – almost funny – about this sober, persistently opaque drama is Zeina Durra’s delivery of a romantic happy ending, scrupulously understated yet undeniable.

10 November 2020