AMPLIFY! film festival starts today, and one of the launch films is Luxor, which is also on general release in the UK today (though not in cinemas, what with them all being closed again). It’s available digitally via an array of services, but, psst, AMPLIFY! may well be the cheapest.
Other titles available on AMPLIFY! from today are…
- environmental anthology Interdependence
- immigrant drama Los Lobos
- transgender road movie Lola
- asylum-seeker documentary Love Child
- tech documentary Robolove
- psychological thriller Rose Plays Julie
- a special compilation of biographical webseries To Be Continued
- silent horror classic Waxworks (ahead of its Masters of Cinema Blu-ray release later this month)
- plus 5 programmes of shorts, with 48 films between them — all available for free!
…and there’s much more to come over the next couple of weeks (the festival ends on Sunday 22nd). For info on all the films, check out the AMPLIFY! programme.
I’ve already seen some of those films, so I intend to review them in the next day or two; but for starters, here are my thoughts on Luxor…
(2020)
Zeina Durra | 86 mins | digital (HD) | 1.85:1 | Egypt, UK & UAE / English & Arabic | 12A
Hana (Andrea Riseborough) arrives in Luxor, Egypt, for a break — as we will come to learn, she’s a doctor who’s been working on the Syrian border, and the traumatic things she witnessed have clearly taken their toll; and Luxor isn’t just a scenic place to visit, but somewhere she spent a significant time, a couple of decades ago, in her 20s. While touring the sights, she happens to bump into Sultan (Karim Saleh), an old friend from back in the day — and, clearly, more than a friend. He’s an archaeologist on a dig, and so they begin to see more sights together, and their connection is rekindled…
Luxor plays like it’s part gentle romantic drama, part tourism video. There are multiple scenes of Hana leisurely roaming around ancient monuments, soaking in the atmosphere and history. (According to writer-director Zeina Durra, “the film had a whole load more of those silent walking scenes but we had to take them out for the sake of the audience’s sanity!”) There’s a lot going on internally for these characters — a lot of stuff we’re not privy to — which will work for some viewers and wholly turn off others. I found Hana’s mental state to be infectious, to a degree. There’s evident nostalgia for her previous time there, tinged with a certain amount of melancholy. Well, nostalgia is inherently quite a melancholic emotion, with its longing for unobtainable pleasures, but Hana is definitely at a time in her life when she’s considering both the past and possible futures. It’s so palpable that Luxor is, at times, the kind of film that’s so seeped in nostalgia it can make you long for a place you’ve never been.
Unfortunately, these things I liked about the film begin to lose footing somewhat as it goes on and hunts around for a conclusion. There’s a thread of spiritual, almost magical realism stuff, which doesn’t feel inappropriate given the history of the place, but it doesn’t sit wholly with the romantic drama bit either. It’s the kind of thing that has to be measured out very carefully if you’re going to mix it into an otherwise grounded drama, and I’m not sure how much the film commits to it. It culminates in a dream sequence that I didn’t buy into. Also rubbing me up the wrong way were the occasional chapter-like title cards, which felt like a pointless addition (I’m tempted to say affectation) because they didn’t seem to add anything, not even a shape or structure, that wasn’t there otherwise.
I liked Luxor at lot at first (if describing it as “a tourism video” sounds negative, well, it’s set in the kind of enchanting place you’d like to watch a travel video about, so that’s ok), but by the end it had kind of lost me. I thought it was better when it had less of a plot, even — I’m not normally the kind of critic to take such a view (I like a story in my films, thanks), but I was succumbing to its relaxed tenor quite pleasantly. In the absence of the option for real-world trips abroad right now, others may well feel the same. What unfolds after that is, I think, on reflection, a meditation on a specific kind of female middle-age. I suspect that, too, will play better with some viewers more than others.
Luxor is screening on AMPLIFY! until Thursday 12th November.
Disclosure: I’m working for AMPLIFY! as part of FilmBath. However, all opinions are my own, and I benefit in no way (financial or otherwise) from you following the links in this post or making purchases.
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