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Andrea Riseborough must have spent a past life as a trapeze artist – his next move always requires attention. Watch her transform into a restless Svetlana Stalin in Armando Iannucci’s black night Death of Stalin – or the heroine of the head trip Mandy, sharing the screen with a fully caffeinated Nicolas Cage. Now, act in the spiral drama Luxor. This is why a naturalistic silence descends, a completely different challenge. Her character, Hana, is a doctor, Home Counties English, who arrives on vacation in the fabled Egyptian city. Booked at the old-fashioned Winter Palace Hotel. An airport-style metal detector awaits you. A guarded note is also visible in Hana, a woman with a spiritually fractured hairline. Almost in passing, she mentions that she came from a war zone.
Yet director Zeina Durra takes us by surprise, her study of emotional scar tissue is never serious or brutal. On the surface, Hana’s balance is flawless. So too was the film, shot neatly with urban chapter headings in a clean serif font (“Freud and Egyptology: a fax from Rio de Janeiro”). Drifting to Luxor is forever at once, as if here less for sightseeing than for evaluating the local tourist industry. More of his personal history resurfaces with the archaeologist Sultan (Karim Saleh), whom he meets on a ferry on the Nile. Both he and Luxor were once meaningful to her, we understand, before anything happened next. Crumpled in agitation, Riseborough plays the scene with reckless acuity. She lets us know that her character arrived in Egypt at exactly this time, although Hana doesn’t even know it herself.
In the midst of reconnection, there are splashes of lightness, excitement in the phone booths of past hotels. The tour of the excavations of the temple of Sultan risks expanding the volume on themes of unavoidable pasts that until now have been subtle. You prepare to clap your hands on your ears. But the feeling of being constantly brought back is handled delicately. For both Hana and Durra, the question is how much trauma someone can witness and be themselves beyond it. Fittingly, the answer will remain in memory.
★★★★ ☆
Streaming November 6, modernfilms.com/luxor
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