“Eagles of the Republic” is the second film in the main competition at this year’s Cannes Film Festival to deal with the making of a movie – but while Richard Linklater’s “Nouvelle Vague” playfully focuses on the production of Jean-Luc Godard’s classic “Breathless,” moviemaking is almost peripheral to the real themes of Tarik Saleh’s “Eagles of the Republic,” which premiered in the main competition on Monday.
Instead, the Egyptian-Swedish director is using cinema as a lens through which to observe one of his favorite subjects, the corruption of power and the slippery moral slope it entails. The third film in his Cairo trilogy that began with “The Nile Hilton Incident” in 2017 and continued with “Boy From Heaven” (also known as “Cairo Conspiracy”) in 2022, the film is less interested in the process of filmmaking than in the calculations behind it, and less interested in stars than in their use in propaganda.
In this case, the star is George Fahmy (Fares Fares, who has appeared in all three of Saleh’s Cairo films). Fahmy is divorced, with a would-be actress girlfriend and a twentysomething son with whom he has an uneasy relationship, partly because the girlfriend might be younger than the son. But he’s still one of Egypt’s biggest movie stars — his nickname is “The Pharaoh of the Screen” – which makes him a tempting target for a group of artists who also proclaim themselves “patriots” when he meets them in a bar. And when he expresses admiration for Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, the president of Egypt, he quickly gets an offer to star in a high-profile biopic.
Fahmy has been under recent suspicion for being anti-Islam and pro-human rights and democracy, which makes him succeptible to pressure. Threats against his son seal the deal, and before long he’s grinning at a photo op to unveil the poster for the al-Sasi biopic, “The Will of the People.” (And if the title reminds you of the Nazi propaganda film “The Triumph of the Will,” so will the poster’s iconography.)
The gig will bring money, access to power circle and, he’s promised, artistic integrity. But Dr. Mansour (Amr Waked), who’s on hand to look out for government interests and says he’s there “to ensure the quality of the work,” seems far more interested in ideological purity than artistic quality. And when Fahmy shows up on the first day of shooting with a bald wig and a prosthetic double chin, he’s quickly disabused of the notion that this movie wants an al-Sisi who actually looks like al-Sisi.
(It’s worth noting that al-Sisi is the real president of Egypt, but the story and the other characters are fictional.)
Looking over the script, Fahmy turns to the director he’s brought into the project and asks with a sigh, “Can you turn this s— into something decent?”
“Of course not,” says the filmmaker.
“Why did you agree to do it, then?”
“The same reason you did.”
This doesn’t sit well with a man who has a healthy ego born of decades of stardom. “George Fahmy doesn’t make bad movies,” says Fahmy, who is mortified when he’s recognized at a pharmacy buying Viagra. And Saleh doesn’t let his leading man off easily: Fahmy buys the Viagra, pops a couple of pills and then goes to visit his girlfriend – who’s distraught because her father just died, and enraged when she thinks that her boyfriend has an erection because her grief turns him on.
The tone of “Eagles of the Republic” initially allows for comedy like that, but Fahmy’s dilemma becomes more tangled. At a private dinner with a group of well-connected men who call themselves the Eagles of the Republic, they assure him that they’re powerful allies who can pull any strings he wants pulled; he asks for a neighbor’s son to be released from police custody after an arrest for protesting, which puts the actor in debt to some shady characters who ask him to give a speech at the graduation ceremony for a military academy.
At the same time, Fahmy begins an affair with a powerful general’s wife, and has plans to take her away to an apartment he has in Dubai. But the government has eyes everywhere, and Mansour is blunt about the lack of options their movie star has: The contract they forced him to sign even includes a signed suicide note in case they want to get rid of him quickly. By the time the graduation ceremony turns into an assassination attempt, Fahmy is in everyone’s crosshairs as he tries to figure out what lies he should tell and what role he’s really been hired to play.
There are elements of a thriller here, as Fahmy tries to negotiate how to get out of the dangerous situation, but more than anything it’s a moral thriller, a terrain with which Saleh has proven his facility. And it asks a question that the filmmaker has been exploring for years: When does compromise turn to complicity?
Handsomely mounted on a $10 million budget that is one of the biggest ever for an Arabic production, and with a musical score by no less than Alexandre Desplat, “Eagles of the Republic” is a good movie about a bad movie. But more than that, it’s the story of a movie star for whom making a bad film is the least of his worries.
The post ‘Eagles of the Republic’ Review: Movies and Politics Don’t Mix, Says This Movie About Politics appeared first on TheWrap.