Director: Tarik Saleh
Writer: Tarik Saleh
Stars: Fares Fares, Lyna Khoudri, Amr Waked
Synopsis: Egypt’s most adored actor, George Fahmy, falls into disgrace with the authorities overnight. On the verge of losing everything, George is forced to accept an offer he can’t refuse.
With Eagles of the Republic, writer/director Tarik Saleh concludes a trilogy of Cairo-set films, each starring Fares Fares in a key leading role. Whether in the clinical The Nile Hilton Incident or the gripping Cairo Conspiracy (AKA Boy from Heaven, which won the Best Screenplay award at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival), Saleh’s Cairo-centric trilogy has emerged itself as an important corpus of dissident cinema, unafraid to heavily criticize the institutions of power that are currently corrupting Egypt’s democracy, under the authoritarian reign of its current President, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi.
In Eagles of the Republic, Saleh criticizes Abdel’s regime head-on, by making its central protagonist, actor George Fahmy (Fares Fares), a mouthpiece of government propaganda. Fahmy is a well-known, highly celebrated figure within Egyptian cinema, especially in the genre pictures that has made him a household name. However, almost overnight, Fahmy’s comments on the current government’s tyrannical reign forces him in a precarious position. Some of his colleagues, including actress Rula Haddad (Cherien Dabis), are forced to speak out against him, which many of them refuse of doing so.
As the government threatens his son and wife’s safety, George has no choice but to reluctantly accept starring in a propaganda film designed to portray Egypt’s president as a heroic figure and portray the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi’s government in a positive light. More than his previous two films, Saleh discusses the subject of cinematic censorship and government propaganda, and showcases exactly how well-known actors eventually get roped in to star in these projects. To put it simply, none of them have a choice in the matter. As George’s agent Fawzy (Ahmed Khairy) says to him, “Nobody says no to them.”
Unfortunately, Eagles of the Republic is also Saleh’s weakest entry in his trilogy, and never fully commits to anything it presents. It’s a real shame, too, because the cast is undoubtedly his most stacked. Apart from the main draw of seeing Fares collaborate with Saleh again, the filmmaker has garnered even more significant talent than his previous two installments, including Lyna Khoudri, whose performances in Martin Bourboulon’s The Three Musketeers diptych has garnered her significant acclaim, and Amr Waked, who is always an effective screen presence.
Sadly, and apart from Fares, every single supporting character are pitifully underused and rarely, if ever, have any shred of development. The treatment of female characters, especially, is appalling. Most, if not ever women in this picture are frequently objectified and used as pawns for George’s sexual desires, with no agency of their own. They’re also the only characters whom the filmmaker disposes of, in particularly brutal ways. It very much leaves a sour taste in the mouth, because the only person who is fully developed and feels somewhat three-dimensional is the central, sexually impotent, male at the heart of the movie.
I wouldn’t mention his carnal issues if Saleh didn’t make it such a big deal, especially when George is around women, who are almost always sexualized. Khoudri and Dabis never feel like fully-fledged characters, but always in service of George no matter what occurs to them. This was also the case in The Nile Hilton Incident, but it didn’t feel as egregious as it does in this entry. These actors deserve so much better, because they’ve proven themselves as capable to portray characters with real agency and feeling, and to see them do the exact opposite is baffling.
Yet, this is one misstep among many in a film that seems cogent in discussing themes of gubernatorial censorship and oppression in a fascistic rule, but doesn’t know where to direct his narrative and thematic threads. Throughout the movie’s slow 128-minute runtime, there’s nary a moment where we recognize what the film clearly wants to state, because it goes in a thousand different directions. Unlike Saleh’s Cairo Conspiracy, which discussed the subject of political espionage with the glacial, but thrilling pace of a John le Carré novel, Eagles of the Republic wants to be about five different things at once.
That wouldn’t be a problem if Saleh knew how to operate between the genres he is undoubtedly wanting to riff on, while simultaneously acting as a movie about movies, but since most of the characters don’t get their time in the spotlight, and the messaging eventually becomes muddled, the emotional impact of the picture is minimal. Fares is, obviously, without reproach. His character is in a perpetual conflict between himself and his own beliefs once he’s forced doing something he doesn’t want to. That internal push-pull is genuinely thrilling, even if Saleh falls short at giving his supporting characters something, anything, of substance.
That’s why when the movie eventually reaches an explosive denouement, with an assassination attempt that recalls the brutal action of Saleh’s debut in Hollywood with The Contractor, the effect such a sequence leaves is minimal. We’ve spent two hours with the same egotistical protagonist whose conflicts are intriguing enough, but lead to nowhere, just like none of the supporting characters possess any ounce of individuality beyond their use as pawns for George. It’s a frustrating conclusion to an otherwise compelling trilogy that positioned Saleh as a major voice to watch within dissident cinema. He still says, but perhaps not in the same way as when Cairo Conspiracy confirmed his greatness. Here’s hoping his next movie will be better than whatever the hell Eagles of the Republic ended up being…
