Café Regular, Cairo

For the most part this is a charmingly frank film that mostly gets by on how very simple it is. A young couple have a discussion at a table in a café in Cairo. They have been together two years but for Mai there are frustrations bottling up and the divorce of her sister and an interaction with some foreigners on a train has brought the subject of sex to the front of her mind – a subject that Alaa is not particularly comfortable discussing in a public place.

That the film is essentially a dialogue scene for 10 minutes means that the challenge is to hold the attention of the viewer and for me this worked really well. The long takes help put you in the scene but also means the actors have to work in longer sections rather than in edited segments. This approach sets the film up for a very natural interaction if the two actors can pull it off. Fortunately they can and both Abozeed and Ezzat are very natural with one another, nervous of those around, taken aback with one another but yet still intimate as a couple. In this regard the film works very well.

For the most part the subject matter works too – mainly because it is a natural discussion, even if it is culturally taboo. The problem comes when the film plays out because the point was not to break all cultural taboos with an act but rather for Mai to test Alaa's dedication to her by asking so much and seeing if he is willing to try to please her. I guess within the context of the culture this makes sense as this would be a big ask (even before the silly detail she asks for) but to me it didn't work because by using sex as the ask it never struck me that she was testing him since offering him sex would not seem like much of a sacrifice for him. It does still work because of the script direction and the nature of the discussion allows to see the desire of the next generation to not be restrained by tradition but at the same time still have the desire to observe it, but by having sex be the central device, it does rather risk the meaning being lost.

That said it was still a very enjoyable little short film thanks to the topic and how naturally it was presented; only the conclusion not being as clever as it thinks it is was a problem for me.