Cairo Café Regular by Ritesh Batra

The dust hasn’t settled yet, its politics that talks about Egypt these days. Café Regular, Cairo is one of the few steps in this festival out of this realm, into normal life, into a discussion that would go around in more quiet times. Nonetheless, these are the questions underlying a revolution, the freedom to shape your life as you wish.

Director Ritesh Batra puts the viewer on the wrong foot in the first minutes of the film, playing cleverly with stereotypical tyrannical Arab men and timid suppressed women in headscarves diverting their gaze. In a simple décor and through simple framing, a conversation between a couple somewhere in a coffeehouse takes unexpected turns. The woman requests her boyfriend to have sex before marriage to see if they would ‘fit’, speaking about it candidly within earshot of the other customers and waiters. Taboos are breaking left and right, the tone of the conversation changing realistically from tense to loving and back.

Acting is somewhat painful in the beginning, but gradually becomes very engaging, a great accomplishment by the two amateur actors who play a version of their own lives. An encounter with foreigners used in the narrative as the catalyst for the woman’s daring plan is perhaps not the best choice. But this film is exactly the kind of story that can diversify the representation of the Arab world.

by Maartje Alders