BY ROGER WATSON
I have never ‘retoured’ to Alexandria. I went once and will never forget it. Fuelled with images from Lawrence Durrell’s masterpiece about post World War II stories in The Alexandria Quartet, I envisaged a bohemian city of bars and clubs, licentious and gay (in the modern sense of the word). Instead, I found a dusty, chaotic dump in the grip of Islamic fervour.
I had flown to Cairo to meet my driver from the Damanhour University in Alexandria. He turned out to be a full on headcase with an exhaust fume filled car – necessitating permanently open windows – with no seatbelts who drove at 80mph. He was clearly lost on the motorway at one point, levelled up with another 80mph car and asked for directions. My first request on arriving was that he did not take me on the return leg to Cairo.
My hotel, posing as a five-star establishment (knock a couple off, at least) sold a local ‘Scotch whisky’ called Monarch of the Glen which tasted like diesel oil. My morning runs along the Mediterranean ‘corniche’ were mostly spent avoiding potholes, piles of gravel and randomly distributed breeze blocks.
To top it all I got the worst case of Tutankhamen’s trots I have ever experienced. I returned to ten days of proximity to the toilet seat during which time I had to deliver a high-profile public lecture at The University of Edinburgh. I don’t know what the extant record for clenching one’s buttocks was, but I smashed it after which I smashed the land speed record as I fled to the nearest loo. There followed a three-course dinner during and after which both records tumbled again.
Retour en Alexandre (Return to Alexandria) is a film in French. Made as a collaboration between Swiss, French and Egyptian production companies and originally released in 2023 the film was released last year with subtitles and only released this year in France.
Starring stunning Lebanese-Canadian actress Nadine Labaki and presented with subtitles, the film portrays a return to the the second city of Egypt by Sue who is played by Labaki. In typical European film fashion, the film is more about feelings than plot.
The film opens in Switzerland with Sue learning from her feisty, chain-smoking, aunt in Cairo that her mother has had a stroke. This triggers the journey to Egypt and a train of memories of her mother. The memories are vivid and the mother, always critical, appears to her at home, in her car and while she shops for clothes.
The mother is alternately approving and disapproving. Clearly, their relationship has been a difficult one and they have been estranged for a long time. She arrives in Cairo and, having fought off the hordes of insistent taxi drivers, she approaches a young driver who is sitting quietly. They strike up a conversation in the taxi. Each time the conversation gets interesting or when he offers her some food, her mother appears and scolds her.
The driver can see that something is wrong. But when he asks her about it, she asks him to stop and gets out of the taxi a long way from her destination. He is solicitous but gets brushed aside. He drives off, leaving her to fend for herself.
She finds her aunt, still chain-smoking, and stays a short time with her before leaving by train for Alexandria. Alexandria looks a great deal more inviting in the film than I recall. Sue procrastinates and we see her driving around the city, visiting bars and staring into the middle distance. All the while plagued by memories of her mother.
Eventually she goes to her mother’s apartment, just in time to find she has died. At this point the subtitles in the Gulf Air flight version I was watching en route to London from Bahrain ran out for the final ten minutes, but I got the gist. Her mother is buried, and Sue takes off in a car into the desert accompanied by her (imaginary) mother. At the final scene, sitting in a coffee shop by the road in the desert, she encounters the taxi driver from Cairo…credits roll.
The film is beautifully shot and hilarious in places. But, in true European film fashion, it is much more a journey than a destination.
Roger Watson is a Registered Nurse and Editor-in-Chief of Nurse Education in Practice.