Not much happens in "Cairo Time," and it doesn't happen in slow, languid fashion. Patricia Clarkson stars as Juliette, a magazine editor who travels to Cairo to visit her husband Mark (Tom McCamus), a Canadian UN worker. But while he's stuck settling trouble in a Gaza Strip refugee camp, Juliette is cooling her heels in the hotel — when she's not exploring the streets, and receiving cold stares from menfolk who wonder why she's not covering her head. She finds a tour guide in Mark's former co-worker, Tareq (Alexander Siddig, famous from "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine"), a transplanted Syrian Muslim, and the two begin a subtle pas de deux toward ... well, not toward much of anything. Canadian writer-director Ruba Nadda unfolds this relationship so gradually and so subtly that time itself seems to stand still as you're watching it. Nadda aims for a mood of contemplation, to match the eternal questions suggested by life in the shadow of the pyramids, but she ends up with a story as inscrutable as the Sphinx.

Sean P. Means HH

Cairo Time

Opens today at the Broadway Centre Cinemas; rated PG for mild thematic elements and smoking; 88 minutes.