Eagles of the Republic - this satire of Egypt’s regime is no laughing matter

He’s a legend of Egyptian cinema, nicknamed the “pharaoh of the screen”. Self-absorbed superstar George Fahmy (the striking Lebanese-Swedish actor Fares Fares) has racked up a whole raft of hokey movie credits with titles such as The First Egyptian in Space and The Impossible Choice. Now well into middle age and dating a sullen starlet (Lyna Khoudri) who is invariably mistaken for his daughter, George has also accrued a fair few bad habits along the way. But he still clings to his principles, claiming loftily that “art is sacred to me”.

Those values are about to be stress-tested when George is approached to star as the real-life authoritarian Egyptian president Abdel Fatah al-Sisi in a hagiographic biopic (think the Melania movie, but with more military hardware). It’s not, he realises, a role he can turn down; implied threats to the safety of his teenage son make that emphatically clear. What starts as a droll satire on the superficiality of celebrity swerves into darker territory in the third film in Tarik Saleh’s Cairo trilogy.

An initially comedic tone represents a refreshing change of pace for the Swedish-Egyptian director. The first film in his trilogy, 2017’s The Nile Hilton Incident, was a grimy police procedural that explored institutional corruption. The second, 2022’s Boy from Heaven (AKA Cairo Conspiracy), was a claustrophobic thriller that unpicked labyrinthine intrigues in a religious university. Grisly murders and Saleh’s regular collaborator Fares both played pivotal roles in the pictures; laughs were few and far between.

In contrast, Eagles of the Republic is astringently funny and unforgiving. Saleh skewers the fragile ego and personal shortcomings of the adored movie star. A terrific, wordless scene of bedroom-based disappointment is followed by a deftly comic sequence in which the heavily disguised actor attempts to buy Viagra from a pharmacist who turns out to be his biggest – and loudest – fan.

The atmosphere is largely amusing on the film set of the political puff production in which George finds himself acting under the watchful eye of military stooges – the supposed “eagles of the republic”. The film’s title – The Will of the People – is, you suspect, a sly nod to Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl’s notorious 1935 Nazi propaganda film. George has reservations about the physical differences between the president (short, bald, pudgy) and himself (tall, with a luxurious carpet of hair and a stately, aquiline profile). Still, he’s an actor who responds equally to adoration and to money, and the project offers him plenty of both. He’s also vain and deluded enough to believe that the rules don’t apply to someone as famous as him, which is perhaps why he makes the ill-judged choice of embarking on an affair with Suzanne (Zineb Triki), the alluring wife of the defence minister.

The main hint at trouble to come is the presence on set of the president’s quietly menacing right-hand man, Dr Mansour (Amr Waked). He’s there, ostensibly, to make sure the leader is represented in a suitably respectful manner. But he starts to overstep, offering directing suggestions and notes on George’s performance. The actor is irked but so distracted and flattered by the privileges of his newly elevated political status that he fails to recognise the dangers of his situation.

Saleh, on the other hand, makes it amply explicit that the film is about to shift from satire to political thriller. Alexandre Desplat’s score sounds a paranoid, Hitchcockian warning. The cinematography, by Pierre Aïm (La Haine), at first takes its cue from the handsome, soapy melodramas in which George made his name. It is polished, carefully composed and lit to emphasise drama and artificiality. But as the serpentine plot uncoils, and George finds himself increasingly snared, Aïm’s camera becomes agitated, with the point of view of a rattled animal looking for an escape.

The film’s subject matter, and its robust critique of the authoritarian tendencies of the Egyptian government, mean it would have been impossible to shoot in Egypt. Instead, like the other features in the trilogy, Eagles of the Republic was filmed outside the country, with Istanbul doubling for Cairo. Saleh has not set foot in Egypt since he was expelled from there over his work in 2015, just weeks before he was due to start filming The Nile Hilton Incident. Judging by the strength of this forthright attack on the current regime, he has no plans to return anytime soon.

Photograph by Yigit Eken/Curzon