Cannes at Home: Day 4 – Christmas on the Nile

by Cláudio Alves

French filmmaker Arnaud Desplechin seems to be on a downward trajectory. His new film, Brother and Sister, has been slaughtered by critics at Cannes, the worst-reviewed Main Competition title so far. For those legions who hoped this would be the year when Marion Cotillard finally won the festival's Best Actress prize, better luck next time! Tarik Saleh's Boy from Heaven was more warmly received despite some cries of conventionality. Through procedural tropes and thriller stylings, the Swedish director explores themes of corruption in Islam, a recurring motif throughout his filmography. These Cannes contenders are both directors' second 2022 pictures – Desplechin's Deception is a new MUBI release, while Saleh's The Contractor has been available for a while. Unfortunately, neither title got much in the way of critical praise.

To keep the Cannes at Home series a celebratory exercise, today's selection looks back at lauded works from these auteurs – A Christmas Tale and The Nile Hilton Incident… 

A CHRISTMAS TALE (2008)

Arnaud Desplechin's best films share a novelistic quality, feeling like they originated in literary tradition before making the leap to the big screen. This is notable, considering the French filmmaker rarely adapts other people's stories. Instead, most of his screenplays are original, preferring to be in dialogue with the rest of the director's self-referential oeuvre rather than some totemic tome. Compared to those other acclaimed flicks, A Christmas Tale might not have the scope one expects from a sprawling novel. Still, there's a richness of character detail, chaptered structuring, and a willingness to shift perspective that more than make up for it.

Indeed, the text is so complex, so grandly ambitious, that it justifies an epic duration that could otherwise be at odds with the intimate affair. Gathering an old Gallic clan at Christmas time, the narrative unspools from Junon Vuillard's health crisis. She's her family's storied matriarch and finds herself in desperate need of a bone marrow transplant. Between blood tests and emotional blackmail, ancient secrets come to light, unrequited loves explode in delayed childhood tantrums, and unpredictability is the tenet that rules it all. Messy and magical, this Gallic family drama just as suddenly veers into comedy as it falls back into tragedy.

All in all, it's a miracle of storytelling mutability that only ever hints at the prospect of holiday season redemptions, never indulging in reconciliatory clichés under the mistletoe. It's also an acting showcase from which it's hard to choose an MVP. Catherine Deneuve's Junon is the logical standout by virtue of her protagonism, but everyone is in top form. Jean-Paul Roussillon won a César for his supporting turn, but my favorite performances came from Mathieu Amalric and the always wonderful Emmanuelle Devos. Moreover, A Christmas Tale has plenty of style with which it modulates its text and performances, shining brightly as one of Arnaud Desplechin's most assured directorial efforts. 

A Christmas Tale is streaming on AMC+, the Criterion Channel, DirecTV, and Pluto TV. You can also rent it on some services.

THE NILE HILTON INCIDENT (2017)

Mere weeks before the Egyptian revolution of 2011, a dead body shows up at the Nile Hilton Hotel. A young Tunisian songstress has been murdered, though the police higher-ups are eager to rule her demise as suicide. However, there's a witness – a Sudanese migrant working as a maid for the luxury hotel, the kind of marginalized nobody who's easily overlooked by those with too much to lose. Slowly, ugly truths are uncovered as all evidence points toward the higher echelons of power. Towards those at the top of a society rotten with corruption, where justice is naught but a feeble delusion, dignity can be bought cheap, and a beautiful woman is worth more dead than she ever was alive. 

As both director and writer, Tarik Saleh negotiates fact and fiction, using recent history in the form of a backdrop for a story dripping with film noir mannerisms. However, one shouldn't discount the picture's political element as atmosphere and nothing else. Sure, there's a sense of apocalyptic inevitability pervading this vision of Cairo, a tonal wrongness that defines much of the movie. However, such unrest represents more than scenery, being the raison d'être of the whole exercise. In The Nile Hilton Incident, narrative is the lie that lets us better understand the truth. It's the artificial lens that allows us to see the world with natural clarity.

This is never more apparent than when considering the film's lead. Played by Fares Fares, Noredin Mostafa is a cynical chain-smoking detective who's long been complicit in the country's corrupt ways. He's our amoral guide into the national elites who play with people's lives as if their economic lesser were something akin to game beasts. Mostafa is never heroic, existing as a reactive figure whose horror is forever balanced by his blame. Black-hearted and just as disillusioned as its leading man, The Nile Hilton Incident can't overrun the shadow of its many cinematic influences. Nonetheless, this Chinatown-wannabee deserves praise for how it twists the parameters of American noir to the specificities of a modern Egyptian milieu.

You can find The Nile Hilton Incident streaming on Tubi and Kanopy. The film is also available to rent on many platforms.