Director – Tarik Saleh – 2025 – Sweden, France, Denmark, Finland – Cert. 15 – 129m
****
A top Egyptian movie star finds himself working on a big budget, high concept, state-sponsored propaganda movie – out in UK and Ireland cinemas on Friday, May 22nd
The opening three scenes… The credits run over a montage of Egyptian movie posters. A group of men outdoors in the Egyptian sun listen attentively to radio commentary of a horse race. One of the men lights his lady passenger’s cigarette from his own as their car speeds towards the horizon of what could well be Monument Valley.. “cut” …but is a movie set with back projection. His assistant tells him has son has called three times – it’s the boy’s birthday, so the actor has his assistant buy his son an expensive watch. Not the greatest of fathers. The kissing couple on the side of the outside studio wall proclaims him to be Pharoah of the Screen George Fahmy (Fares Fares from Cairo Conspiracy, Tarik Saleh, 2022; Westworld, TV series, 2018; The Nile Hilton Incident, Tarik Saleh, 2017; Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Gareth Edwards, 2016; Department Q: The Keeper of Lost Causes, Mikkel Nørgaard, 2013; Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow, 2012) and her Rula Haddad (Cherien Dabis, director of Only Murders in the Building, 6 episodes, 2021-23).
When he has a birthday coffee with his son Rami (Suhaib Nashwan), the son accuses his dad of having a girlfriend the same age as his own girlfriend Mai (Mariam Elsayed), who joins them shortly after. As the three make conversation, George suddenly becomes aware of a man watching him from a window table. Later, at a bar with his young girlfriend Donya (Lyna Khoudri from The Three Musketeeers: D’Artagnan, Martin Bourboulon, 2023; The French Despatch, Wes Anderson, 2021), George is accosted by his agent Fawzy (Ahmed Khairy from The Nile Hilton Incident), who introduces fellow actor Yasser Islam (Sherwan Haji) and Mrs. Suzanne (Zineb Triki), the wife of someone important. They are a committee of artists against those trying to to taint the President and the army. George is uneasy. That night, with Donya, he’s impotent.
Rula tells him she’s been asked to do a TV interview discrediting him. As a routine part of film production under the Egyptian regime, George finds himself and his director attending a hijab-wearing women’s religious panel headed by Mme Afef (Hiba Osman) warns him he’s not untouchable. At the studio, his trailer is moved and he has been replaced on the film by Yasser Islam. Over coffee, Fawzy warns George that they’re out to get him. There’s a film offer from the military coming in, about the president’s rise to power. “No-one says no to them,” says Fawzy.
George goes to the Unlimited Media Group, premises dripping with State money, where he’s formally introduced to Dr. Mansour (Amr Waked from Firebrand, Karim Anouz, 2023; Lucy, Luc Besson, 2014; Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Lasse Hallström, 2011; Syriana, Stephen Gaghan, 2005), charged with maintaining quality on the film. The director George has drafted in doesn’t think he can make a good movie out of their shit script. During shooting, he’s invited to meet Nasser El-Ghul, the Minister of Defence (Nael), whose wife turns out to be the mysterious Suzanne. In the smoking room after dinner, another man tells George they are the shield that protect the country – the eponymous Eagles of the Republic. George is invited to make a speech at an upcoming presidential rally.
The web of intrigue in which George now finds himself is beginning to tighten around him and his friends. Rula, following her TV interview in which she refused to say anything against George, now finds no-one returning her phone calls. Later she vanishes, and the Minister of Defence enlists George’s help trying to find her.
When George runs into Suzanne at a breast cancer evening, she warns him, she’s a restricted area… a minefield. That doesn’t stop the pair of them embarking on nights in bed in the Ramses Hilton. Dr. Mansour, a master of surveillance who appears to know everything that’s going on, uses the affair as leverage to get George to get Rula to wear a wire when she meets the Minister of Defence.
Chillingly, among the contracts George has to sign for Dr. Mansour on behalf of the military film production is a suicide note in his own handwriting “to save your loved ones checking the hospitals, police stations or morgues if you disappeared without a trace. God forbid.”
Meeting Rula, her lip disfigured, George tells her about the wire. Her good side to camera, recalling Genevieve Bujold in her trailer in Dead Ringers (David Cronenberg, 1988), George talks about being actors who speak lines others have written for them. It feels deeply fatalistic, as if neither of them has any control over their destiny.
When Dr. Mansour is later shown in a van parked clandestinely near a hotel watching a computer stream of the recording of her wire, he is puffing on a cigarette and exhaling smoke like a dangerous, dormant dragon whose power is to be deeply feared.
Indeed, following a bravura sequence in which George finds himself unwittingly giving the signal to start a coup, he finds himself aboard an military ‘copter watching Mansour removing the blindfolds of various insurgents to question them, ask the names of their parents and then unflinchingly have them thrown out of the back of the airborne craft.
The film is effective up to a point as a political thriller, although there are many thrillers that are considerably more thrilling and many political thrillers that pack more of a punch. For instance, it’s in nowhere near the same league as cinema of surveillance masterwork The Conversation (Francis Coppola, 1974). That said, I far preferred it to the same director Saleh’s earlier Cairo Conspiracy and The Nile Hilton Incident. At least the picture of state apparatus for propaganda (and its fundamental misunderstanding of how art and artists work) is on the ball here, as far as it goes.
Eagles of the Republic is out in cinemas in the UK and Ireland on Friday, May 22nd.
Trailer: