After seeing Portrait of a Lady on Fire for the first time this year, I realize that I’m willing to put myself through complete devastation when it comes to the slow ignition between flames, former or beginning. For many people, this sort of thing would be classified as a romantic movie. But there’s a certain domain of the genre where prolonging the potential energy between two bodies leaves a deeper imprint on my heart than the heavy-footed actions equating to inevitable entanglement. No longer am I enamored by a mismatched quirkiness that had consumed me when I saw Wristcutters in high school; I now hear “Kissing You” looping in my dreams.
Like most things, there is a clear delineation where a slow-burn can become overindulgent and self-important, which makes for a recipe of a vision’s worst fear: boring. If it was careless enough, Zeina Durra’s Luxor could be a metaphor that drowns itself in tourist scenery; Hana (Andrea Riseborough), a British surgeon who spends her time volunteering as a war medic, takes respite in the Egyptian city of Luxor, where she runs into her archaeologist ex-boyfriend Sultan (Karim Saleh). As the city is known for retelling the greatness of buried civilizations, Hana and Sultan also indulge in the same activity with their relationship, although through different tints of rose-colored glasses. If it didn’t play its cards right, Luxor could have been added to the thesaurus under “pensive” or “furrowed characters that seem to go nowhere.”
Instead, Durra manages to elicit a charm that orbits between Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Ritesh Batra’s Photograph. Luxor’s towering antiquities are visually cemented into the streets’ bustling modernity to create a fitted outfit for Egypt. Similar to the ways I can remember how cold and damp the grass must have been when Jesse and Celine were lying down or the colorful arrangement of convenient goods in a Mumbai market, Luxor presents a new context of smallness and awe in spite of our longstanding needs and passions. Hana brings a looming pain when she departs from aiding in the Syrian border, but begins to loosen up when Sultan boldly flirts with not only her, but with fate’s fleeting wink.
The film doesn’t try to exhaust itself in surpassing its predecessors with emotional range, but it finds comfort in tucking itself into a corner after a long day’s stroll and chatters. The mix of Riseborough’s delivery of dry humor and Saleh’s unabashed enthusiasm makes the two, and the audience, at ease and less focused on a singular goal. In that way, there is a third vessel for romance, where closure seems insignificant.
Luxor
2020
dir Zeina Durra
85 min
Available VOD on Friday, 12/4
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