Juliette (Patricia Clarkson, left) becomes unexpectedly entangled with her husband's friend, Tareq (Alexander Siddig), in Cairo Time. (Mongrel Media)

Cairo Time, winner of the Best Canadian Film prize at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, has many things going for it: exotic locations, gorgeous cinematography, Patricia Clarkson and a script that believes a middle-aged woman’s inner life is compelling fodder for a feature-length film.

The romance in Cairo Time is curiously inert and inconsequential.

But it’s also the kind of movie where tasteful characters move around in tasteful hotel suites while wearing tasteful white linen dress shirts. There’s something a bit sterile about the film — I admire Cairo Time, but I wish I cared about it more.

The story centres on Juliette (Patricia Clarkson), a Canadian magazine editor who arrives in Cairo for a vacation with her diplomat husband, Mark (Tom McCamus), only to learn he’s been waylaid at a refugee camp in Gaza. Mark’s former colleague and friend, Tareq (Alexander Siddig), is a Cairo native and offers his travel-guide services to Juliette before depositing her at her posh hotel.

Toronto writer-director Ruba Nadda works wonders with this opener – Juliette is so jetlagged she resembles an extra from Night of the Living Dead, and after waking from one of many naps, she lies alone in bed, laughing at the zoned-out state she’s in. Her first solo excursions in Cairo are equally disorienting — we see scenes of Juliette standing on a congested street, surrounded by nothing but honking cars and smog, which wordlessly convey the feeling of trying to adjust to the rhythms of a city that’s not your own.

Clarkson, always a live wire, suggests Juliette is a woman who doesn’t believe in down time. She fiddles with her laptop and, in quieter moments, hints of vague dissatisfaction and loneliness flutter across her face. At night on the phone, she tells Mark she’s dreading the thought of attending embassy dinners with the “petroleum wives” she loathes, and jokes that she’ll go crazy if she doesn’t find something to do while in Egypt.

A chance meeting with Tareq at a local café helps her to finally get her bearings. The two embark on a series of day trips, in which cinematographer Luc Montpellier expertly captures all of the hustle and bustle of the Cairo streets – there are plenty of vibrant shots of the colourful hijabs, jewelry stalls and bright green melons that fill up the city’s noisy, bustling marketplaces. There’s a nice grittiness to these scenes of urban Cairo, which are far more interesting than some of the more obvious travelogue moments, like when Juliette goes boating on the Nile.

Juliette (Clarkson, centre left) is absorbed in both Tareq and Egyptian culture in Cairo Time. (Mongrel Media)

Though Tareq agreed to act as Juliette’s gentlemanly host out of loyalty to Mark, the two begin to forge a more complicated bond. She’s grateful to have a companion who can explain the local customs (and teach her to smoke a hookah pipe), but one senses the outings mean more to her than that. Somehow, in all of this conversation, Juliette displays parts of herself she can never unveil at home. In turn, Tareq seems genuinely tickled by this woman who will boldly walk into an all-male café and beat him at chess. As Tareq explains, many men in Cairo “believe women’s voices should not be heard at all.”

Their budding romance bears more than a passing resemblance to the one depicted in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. Like that film, Cairo Time is largely concerned with the things that go unsaid – there are a lot of simmering, meaningful glances exchanged in the film’s latter half. I appreciate Nadda’s attempts to make a movie where the emphasis is on subtlety and loaded silences, but the romance in Cairo Time is curiously inert and inconsequential.

A lot of this stems from the film’s uneven script, which is delicate in some moments, far too exposition-heavy in others. Equating Juliette’s name with a certain doomed Shakespearean heroine, or mentioning Mark’s “good heart” near the beginning certainly telegraphs things. Juliette’s status as a diplomat’s wife also undercuts a lot of the tension that might arise from the fish-out-of-water setup.

When a bus riding through a more remote part of Egypt is stopped and searched by heavily armed soldiers, there’s never a doubt Juliette’s passport and UN affiliations will ensure she’s safely back in Cairo by day’s end. Without any real danger in Juliette’s sightseeing and romantic scenes, it’s difficult to feel all that invested in the outcome.

This is a shame, because the two leads give it their all, each bringing some much-needed emotional weight to Cairo Time’s final scenes. Still, viewers are likely to emerge from the movie feeling a bit like road-weary travellers themselves — after the memories of the exotic food, customs and interesting people have faded, mostly they’ll just remember the pretty pyramids.

Cairo Time opens in Toronto and Montreal on Oct. 9, Halifax, Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, Vancouver and Victoria on Oct. 16 and in Ottawa on Oct. 23.

Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.