Avis des critiques

Said’s debut is a valuable artifact of a time that’s already gone, brought to life and view years after it was begun. Perhaps, like Khalid, it took him some time to find his film as well.

Whether “In the Last Days of the City” ultimately comes together as a feature is open to debate, but this is a film of beauty and skill.

In a sense, Khalid’s constant need to film speaks to his growing emotional exile from this world. But it also reflects a more immediate anxiety: He is, perhaps, looking for those very things — the images, the textures, the feelings — that will allow him to carry this place and everything it represents within him. What we’re really witnessing is how a city becomes a memory, how a physical home becomes a spiritual one.

A film about trying to make a film, Tamer El Said’s In the Last Days of the City (2016) feels at once impressionistic and monumental, a drifting collage of fragments that amounts to something singular and fully realized. As a mesmerizing, turbulent portrait of Cairo on the cusp of the Arab Spring, it gestures toward the “city symphony” genre.

We observe political rallies, drunken celebration, fleeing thieves, but also moments of repose: the sighs of the city, the roosting of chickens, the inadequate watering of cacti. El Said’s rhythms are patient and peripatetic, capturing the desultory and the in-between. Khalid, facing the overwhelming task of sifting his days into art, cannot finalize his film any more than he can sort out his life.

Each scene in the film is framed and captured as if in a snapshot; for all the apparent entropy of Khaled's existence, every moment is carefully chosen. Juxtaposed against the city's disorder, and a listlessness that permeates everything, is a lyrically, meticulously edited progression of scenes that move very much at the pace of the city, and of the everyday life unfolding in it. So much seems to be happening, and yet, for each of us, things so often stay the same.

This multi-layered docu-fiction offers a meditation on one´s place within a rapidly changing environment, as the gears of history turn more ever more frantically. It is also a film capsule freezing on a particular chapter in history, not only of the city. Khalid´s clips of the unfinished documentary comprise an organic part of El Said´s film, a meta-textual point of filmmaker-character union resulting in a more intimate and authentic elegy created by the same eye.

In an indecisive edit session, Khalid's editor takes him to task for collecting loose fragments with no connective tissue, and the same charge will—and probably should—be levied against In the Last Days of the City itself. But the din that erupts from the logjam—creative, psychic, historical, national—is nothing if not honest.

In the Last Days of the City is certainly effective as a love story. It captures in atmospheric fragments the feel of a romance pulling apart. But the film is also an extremely precise and deeply moving enactment of a much bigger story—about what has happened in the last hundred years or so to Egypt and the Arab world, its artists especially.

The walls, alleys and skylines of downtown Cairo, often bathed in the fading light of sunset, dominate this piercingly melancholy yet stirring portrait of the Egyptian capital by its director Tamer El Said. In its eye for rich visual detail, it also captures didactic stickers in elevators and other strictures inscribed in a cityscape noisy with signals.