"This is Grant Park. Doesn't this spot remind you of the Corniche in Alexandria?"

"You still remember Egypt?"

He smiled and said, "Of course..."

Chicago, Alaa El Aswany

—

My friends joke that I'm obsessed with Egypt. They wait for me to mention it in any conversation, because it's only a matter of time before I find some way to bring it up. "Oh my God, there he goes," they groan. It doesn't help that I got a couple of cheap shirts with a comically large graphic of the pyramids I wear whenever I want to throw on a quick fit. I got them on my trip to Egypt last September, the first time in fifteen years, I think? It's been so long that I don't care to pin the date down. Egypt has always been in my periphery, even here on the other side of the world in Chicago. The first time I saw Lake Michigan, I thought it looked just like the Corniche, the promenade that runs through most of Alexandria, an observation I'm not the first to make. The similarity begins and ends at the superficial: at night, the parks along the lake close, and if you step off the lakefront trail to sink your toes into the sand and your eyes into the blackness, the cops patrolling will turn to you with a megaphone and yell at you to get off the beach. I remember sitting on the coast of Alexandria with my dad in the black of night as people ran around me, blew clouds of smoke, and shouted their conversations long into the dead of night. I dream of going back. There's nothing like Alexandria.

What do I know? In turn, I joke with my friends that they shouldn't ask me about Egypt; I'm New Jersey-born and bred, even if all my family is from Alexandria. There's something about the city that draws people into its orbit regardless of how far they find themselves strewn away from it. The Egyptian sociologist Amro Ali says it best, "What romance is to Paris and ambition is to New York, nostalgia is to Alexandria." Nowhere does this find expression better than Egyptian director Youssef Chahine's Alexandria Trilogy, a lifelong work seeped in longing for the cosmopolitan Alexandria of his youth. This version of Alexandria, crystallized in an instant of time, haunts his oeuvre and inspires countless other cases of obsession across media. Take Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet and Ibrahim Abdel Meguid's No One Sleeps in Alexandria, which imagine the same cosmopolis at its mid century peak. To think about Alexandria has become synonymous with a vain over-sentimentality for a long-gone past.

Tamer Ruggli's feature-length debut, Back to Alexandria — originally Retour en Alexandrie — wrestles with these same thematic concerns in 21st-century Alexandria, a city that finds itself rapidly changing due to currents of Westernization and urban development (fun fact: Chahine's long-time collaborator and scriptwriter, Yousry Nasrallah, wrote the script for Back to Alexandria). The film follows the psychiatrist Sue (played by Nadine Labaki, director of Capernaum) as she makes the long trip from Switzerland to Alexandria to visit her ailing and estranged mother, Fairouz, played by French actress Fanny Ardant. The dialogue is almost entirely in French, owing to Sue's aristocratic background, one that she often finds herself at odds with.

Alexandria, and by extension, Sue's mother, cast a long shadow over Sue. Still, the film doesn't dwell on the city per se so much as it does on the journey towards home and the swirling doubts, traumas, and fears that consume Sue as she visits an Egypt made unfamiliar through two decades of absence. The first person Sue meets after landing in Egypt, her taxi driver, comments on how long she's been away before she asks him to stop talking and just drive, partly because he's annoying, partly because she's getting hot in the face. Before he shuts up, he plays the classic song "Ahwak" by the late Egyptian singer Abdel Halim Hafez. I've written about "Ahwak" and its prominent use in the soundtrack of "Ramy." It's a singular piece of music, if only because it captures the feeling of a torturous ad nauseam push-and-pull love with an inimitable precision. It's a song of a heartbroken lovebird as it is the song of a woman who finds herself drawn back to a life she thought she'd left behind. The title of the film is translated Back to Alexandria rather than Return to Alexandria — Sue's homecoming isn't the grand return of the prodigal son, but a sulking trek back to the source of her unresolved grudges and griefs.

At every leg of the trip, hallucinations of Sue's mother haunt her, and they talk, argue, and fight, often to the confusion of those around her. At times, they laugh together, but most other times, they're at each other's necks. The bad blood between the two runs deep. Fairouz and Sue's disagreements stem from Sue's ex-romance with a local doorman sometime in her youth, one that Fairouz forced Sue to end, with the reason being that he was 'low class.' Sue can't wrap her head around why her mother is so cruel, so arrogant and elitist, but most of all, so severe. As Sue approaches Alexandria, she cuts closer and closer to the source of their disagreement. In their final confrontation, Sue realizes her mother is a broken woman, trying the best she can. Her mother projects the same pain that she once was a victim of. Sue sees her as she is and tells her, "I forgive you, but I no longer love you."

There's a rare-form cohesion that's kept the film lingering for the last few days. All the layers — the sonic and the visual — rhyme. Ruggli isn't the first to explore the struggle of confronting the trauma of the past, but to do so in Alexandria feels particularly a propos. Alexandria is situated in the interstice of yesterday and tomorrow, unable to come to terms with its past or future, just like Sue and especially like Fairouz. The casting of Fanny Ardant works fantastically; Ardant doesn't speak Arabic at all, which plays into the film's conceit. Sue speaks in English, Arabic, and French, but she and Fairouz exclusively speak French. Among Egyptians, French has and continues to serve as a class marker. Fairouz clings to her aristocratic status with a clawish perversion. She's obnoxiously vain, but as Fairouz, Ardant steals every scene in all her overstatededly-green haute couture and leopard print, in stark contrast to Sue's much more muted choice of dress. For Ruggli, the city and mother become identified together: both Alexandria and the real Fairouz appear on-screen briefly. It's not the city or Sue's mother that mean anything, but rather Sue's understanding of them — in lieu of their presence — that drives the film.

Ruggli only decides to show Alexandria in the third act, but in spectacular fashion, as Sue drives her family's glam 1950s pink DeSoto convertible along the Corniche. Of the films I've seen this year, Back to Alexandria has managed to capture and present some of the most impactful images I've seen in a while. I can't recall the last movie that made the city or hell, even Egypt, look so stunning. Past and present merge in Back to Alexandria's final minutes, and I wonder if this is the way forward: maybe it's a pastiche, maybe it's embracing the past and present, as absurd as the combination can sometimes be, to move forward.

At the end of the film, Sue runs into the taxi driver she met at the start of the film, and he asks if Egypt will ever see her again. She coyly answers with a maybe as the film fades to black and "Ahwak" plays over the credits. The past is the past is the past, but that's not to say it will ever leave us alone, not at least with some claw marks that pull us back in once more.

‘Back to Alexandria’ - Review

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