20-05-2025
Eagles of the Republic
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 (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.
