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The movie opens with Juliette, a magazine editor who is arriving in Cairo to meet her husband Mark for an anticipated three week vacation. This is her first tour of the whole region and her husband is delayed in arriving for days on end with his work with the U.N. in a separate area of the region. In the meantime, a former U.N. associate who had worked with her husband and a native of Cairo, Tareq, greets her at the airport and keeps watch over her stay at the very posh hotel in Cairo. He is a gentleman in escorting her around. You are not as sure of her current standing with her husband Mark as the phone calls don’t seem to exude all that much zest and you only here her end of the dialogue as she is keeping tabs as to when he can finally arrive. From her conversations with Tareg, Mark does seem like a great guy who is well intentioned. As it turns out, she initially seems to decompress and soak in the air and the awesome sights right from the hotel area as she had been hauling in long hours as the editor of a prestigious international magazine back home. While there are some moments of outer tension in the film, overall the depictions, the scenery is something on the side of awesome and pleasantness just exudes from this film. As she goes about with Tareg, a fondness seems to grow between them that is like an flower opening to the sun. Tareg, has a checkered romantic history as the movie delves further. He has been hurt in love and seems to have retreated totally and justified it by tending to his café, but he has the genuinely deep capacity for romance and friendship that matches the wondrous scenes of this picture and his own low key affairs seem to be a mismatch for his capacity for romance, a capacity that hasn’t been mirrored in others to where he could see it himself. Juliette, seems to have lost some sense of her attractiveness to the crowd and is surprised to find young men in the street following her as the pretty blond when she goes for a stroll. Her attractiveness and having not the common look locally seem to attract youthful admirers, something she hasn’t experienced back home she says in years. They don’t mean any real harm but she is somewhat flattered and a little startled by this. The pull between her and Tareq is at first as friends and confidants but she is feeling more and so is he and you wonder if these type of feelings were submerged also for her at some levels and only brought out by these new, exiting and different surroundings and this new level of friendship. There is a touch of sadness in this movie, in that both these central characters seem to want to feel more deeply than they may have at some level and this is only maybe a fleeting moment in what might have been. You really don’t know their full history but the seeming newness of these feelings of romance is telling that they might have never been there to the fullest extent for either and it is a matter of interpretation as to what had been for each of them in the past. But even if they had these feelings in other settings and with other people, the pull now is real and strong for both of them, and the current situation seems to etch as unique and special. It also goes to the idea of the best companionship, and this film gives a great look of appreciation towards what companionship might mean. The other characters in this film, particularly some of the female characters are quite pleasant. The scenes had enough of a lingering presence so you could really enjoy them and some of the surrounding beauty that was caught just right, including right at the Great Pyramids themselves. This movie will hit the spot for a lot of people.
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