Imagine George Clooney being coerced into playing Donald Trump in a straight-faced hagiography – perhaps directed by one of White House’s new Special Ambassadors – and you’ve got the predicament faced by the Egyptian movie star at the heart of Swedish-Egyptian director Tarik Saleh’s new thriller.
George Fahmy (Fares Fares), the so-called ‘Pharaoh of the Screen’, is a much-loved fiftysomething actor carving out a comfortable, westernised living on Cairo’s soundstages and in its members’ bars, parroting Samuel Beckett quotes to the much younger girlfriend (Lyna Khoudri) who looks to him for a career leg-up.
But under the repressive rule of real-life president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, that feckless lifestyle leaves him wide open to blackmail. It’s made clear that if he wants to continue having a career and keep his student son out of jail, he’ll have to don el-Sisi’s old military uniform for a propaganda film called The Will of the People. He’s already a cliché, they want to make him a tool too. ‘Nothing is for free,’ he’s told. Including his freedom.
Fares, star of the two previous films in Saleh’s ‘Cairo trilogy’, The Nile Hilton Incident (2017) and The Cairo Conspiracy (2023), is a hoot as an egotistical dilettante whose dreams of an easy life in a difficult country are scuppered in brutal fashion.
It’s an Armando Iannucci-esque send-up of something deadly serious
Saleh uses the first half to poke fun at both the regime and the actor, before hairpinning into a final stretch where things turn dark very quickly. It’s a jarring tonal shift – like Argo suddenly turning into Costa-Gavras’s Z – that makes logical sense but still jolts after all the old-man Viagra jokes that came before.
And Eagles of the Republic doesn’t serve its female characters especially well. The coolly intellectual wife of a regime figure, Suzanne (Zineb Triki), loses all colour once she falls into bed with George, a man she’d surely see right through, and the actor’s loyal, long-time co-star Rula (Cherien Dabis) is reduced to a pawn in the fast-thickening plot. Neither has the impact of the menacing Dr Mansour (Amr Waked), a state security overseer of few words behind the on-set monitor.
This is not, of course, the kind of movie you can make in Egypt – or the kind of movie you can make if you have any great desire to live there again. El-Sisi has been the country’s president since 2014 and Eagles of the Republic’s world of brutal repression, artistic censorship, and toadying military types jostling for position feels dangerously real.
A satire with a dissident energy and a dark denouement, it’s an Armando Iannucci-esque send-up of something deadly serious.
Eagles of the Republic premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.