God proposes, special services dispose – Weekend – Kommersant
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In Tarik Saleh’s new film The Cairo Conspiracy, which is being released in Russian cinemas, the story in the spirit of Umberto Eco is played out in the scenery of Al-Azhar, one of the world’s oldest universities. Power struggles, corruption, murder of unwanted informants, spy secret meetings, skeletons in every closet, questions of faith – imagine John Le Carré writing The Name of the Rose.
Adam, the son of an illiterate fisherman, enters Al-Azhar, a stronghold of Islamic thought. He is just beginning to get used to the measured and harsh university life, to get along with fellow students, only to find out how attractive Cairo is at night and what an energy drink tastes like, how the drama of growing up turns into a political thriller. Suddenly, the Great Imam, the spiritual leader of Al-Azhar, dies. The President of the country wants to see his protege as a successor in this post, the Muslim Brotherhood organization (banned in the Russian Federation) – his own, and the people trust the third candidate. In Al-Azhar, one of the students is brutally murdered in front of Adam. Colonel Ibrahim arrives to investigate this case, and now Adam will have to take the place of the murdered student: he is forced to become an informer for the state security service.
The disheveled Ibrahim, who looks more like a mad professor than a secret service officer, will teach Adam the basics of conspiracy, ask him to look after those students, to gain confidence in these, but there is no need to call his native village, there’s no point in it, with no one at all It’s better not to discuss anything. But Adam, the perpetually gloomy and confused Adam, who always has that expression on his face, as if one more effort and he will understand what he got himself into, he will turn out to be a terrible informer. He will stubbornly follow his own ideas of justice and destiny.
The film by Tariq Saleh, a Swede of Egyptian origin, has the paranoid complexity of Le Carré’s novels, the bruising of elderly intelligence officers who came straight out of political thrillers of the 1970s, the rigidity and strict rules of the male world, as in prison dramas, corruption, the confrontation between religious and political forces – like in life. The innocent hero becomes maturing with every step, but if in the “Prophet” by Jacques Odyar, with whom the “Conspiracy in Cairo” is most often compared, the hero becomes more and more impenetrable, that is, he turns out to be more and more cunning, then Saleh’s Adam becomes more and more impenetrable – that is, turns out to be more and more unsophisticated. In the end, his faith is so strengthened that the blind teacher tells him: “You no longer need a mentor.”
The blind teacher is a hello to Umberto Eco and his “Name of the Rose”, an intellectual web with the blind librarian Jorge at the very center. The idea for The Cairo Conspiracy came about when Saleh was re-reading Eco and decided to do something similar with Al-Azhar. Is it possible to create a detective walled up inside the “guiding star of Islamic thought”? The task is all the more difficult because after the previous Cairo detective Saleh “The Case at the Neil Hilton Hotel”, the backdrop for which was the “Arab Spring”, they do not want to see the director in Egypt, so most of the “Conspiracy” was filmed in Turkey.
Saleh has always been interested in issues of power and subordination. Twilight animated dystopia “Metropia” (2009) told, not without the influence of Philip Dick, about “ordinary people” obeying someone else’s will, in the midst of the endless European rain of 2024. In The Case at the Neil Hilton Hotel, a corrupt police officer suddenly flared up with a thirst for justice. Saleh is a writer, he builds his stories according to novel, not cinematic laws – it was not for nothing that The Cairo Conspiracy won the Cannes prize for screenplay.
Fares Fares (“Target One”, “Westworld”, “Chernobyl”), whom Saleh seriously considers “one of the five greatest living actors,” here does not look like a cop from “The Incident at the Neil Hilton Hotel” : his colonel Ibrahim is awkward, out of place, after all, he is old. The confrontation between generations is also fleetingly shown: the old colonel of state security wants to figure everything out, penetrate the system and observe, negotiate and cunning. His young boss acts differently: he proposes to liquidate everyone, and then everything will sort itself out somehow.The young informant Adam (Taufik Barhom, “Kumir”) wants everything to be according to the rules.
With his attitude to religion as the basis of the world order, Saleh is close to Scorsese with his greedy, searching look at the heavens – and if the heavens are silent, then you have to look into the face of the enemy, into the face of a friend, into the mirror. All Scorsese films are one big Catholic sermon, they are permeated with guilt, the idea of repentance and redemption. In The Cairo Conspiracy, the Muslim Saleh reflects on Islam: about predestination, about submission to Allah. His world, like the world of Scorsese, is organized according to God’s laws. This man ruins everything.
But a person corrects everything in him, if he follows his destiny.
What are we fulfilling – the divine will or our own whim? Who chooses us – special services or providence? Realizing that the operation is coming to an end, Ibrahim tells Adam: “We are not the masters of our destiny. Allah chose you.” Adam retorts, “You chose me.”
Saleh does not just talk about the consequences of the choice, about the relationship between the state and religion, does not just talk about corruption – he builds a labyrinth of questions of power and subordination, from dead ends of despair and self-incrimination, from other people’s sins and his own mistakes, and all the time it seems that we are here Let’s see what we’re getting into.
In theaters from November 10
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