Country: Egypt
Director: Tarik Saleh
Time: 1 hour and 46 minutes
What It Elicits: Film noir, police corruption, and power obscured
Where Can I Get It: Amazon ($3.99 to rent)
Inside a luxury hotel, three men stand over the corpse of a woman. One eats shrimp he has ordered from room service, while a second peels open the deceased woman’s wallet and pockets some of her cash. The second man is Nuredin, our central protagonist. The men feasting and pilfering are the police. Welcome to Tarik Saleh’s Cairo.
The Nile Hilton Incident, perhaps the least welcome piece of brand placement in movie title history, surrounds the murder of a fledgling singer (beautiful, naturally, as we’re in the hard-boiled detective territory of Raymond Chandler or Dashiell Hammett where the men are cynical and tough and the women beautiful and potential femme fatales). The film centers on Nuredin, a cop attempting to unravel the truth surrounding the singer’s death. As we are shown and as he quickly suspects, she has almost certainly been killed at the behest of her lover—whose status as a rich property developer and friend of the President’s son facilitates the effective obstruction of any investigation, a nod to the pernicious influence of the erstwhile Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s son Gamal. Film noir and Egyptian politics are both fertile ground for cynics, yet The Nile Hilton Incident transcends its genre confines by enveloping its viewer in the different (and competing) layers of the Egyptian state security apparatus (thus broadening its scope beyond bad and hard men towards a view of institutions) and drawing attention to the ramifications of their failures by setting itself in the days before the January 25 protests which inaugurated the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. In an unintentional ode to the film’s incisiveness, the Sisi government banned its director from filming in the country—it was shot in Casablanca—and did not allow it theatrical release.
Humanizing a Cairo police officer, deeply flawed though he may be, remains an effective vehicle to discuss the corrupting nature of the Egyptian institutions. In real life, the brutal June 2010 murder of a young man named Khaled Said in Alexandria by police and the eventual appearance of his bruised corpse online helped galvanize the 2011 protests—a Facebook page in his honor became one of the central organizing spaces for the January 2011 protests beginning, not incidentally, on “National Police Day.” Indeed, police brutality and sadism is not overlooked in the film. At the same time, Nuredin himself both partakes in and rebuffs the institutional corruption and politicking. Yet, as with much noir, the truth remains only partially glimpsed. Our initial murder remains only a cresting wave underneath an ocean of politicking between competing state security institutions, all of it occurring amidst a rising tide of discontent gathering force. A lot of ink has been spilt on why the Egyptian revolution did not succeed in preserving the precarious democracy that emerged in the wake of the 2011 protests, but for pure visual symbolism and force, the film’s final scene offers one of the better answers.
Go Down The Rabbit Hole With:
Tarik Saleh — Gitmo: The New Rules of War (2005)
Youssef Chahine — Cairo Station (1958)