Café Regular, Cairo

Trying Too Hard to be Deep🥴 *Art for art’s sake is a nice concept on paper, but it rarely does anything for the actual audience. These days, there’s a desperate urge in conservative societies to prove they’re modernizing, and the go to move is to pick a taboo topic usually sex and dress it up in some pretentious, overly artistic packaging. It’s an easy way to grab attention, but it doesn't make for a good movie. The director of Café Regular, Cairo clearly thinks that just talking about sex is enough to make a film feel groundbreaking. It’s like he’s trying to channel the vibe of Louis Malle’s My Dinner with Andree, but he completely misses the mark. The film opens with the most stale, banal conversation about divorce you could imagine it’s like hearing stuff we’ve all heard a million times before. Then there’s the casting. Honestly, the chemistry between the two leads is non exxistent. The guy doesn't show an ounce of genuine affection, and the whole romantic dynamic feels more like two college kids playing hooky at a cheap café than an actual couple. I spent the whole film wondering: what’s the point? People get married and have kids in conservative countries all the time without making a big production out of it. Why go to a random, dingy café just to have this awkward, forced talk about physical intimacy? The film never gives you a reason, it’s obsessed with the idea of telling a story about sex, but it has no idea why it’s telling it in the first place. At the end of the day, this is the textbook definition of art for art’s sake It’s a film for people who want to feel superior by pretending they gget something that, in reality, is just empty and pretentious *