Maybe the fact that Cairo Time was released around the same time as Eat Pray Love is pure coincidence, but the earlier, less trumpeted film does feel a bit like the forgotten older sister of the glitzy blockbuster.

Like Julia Roberts’ Liz, Patricia Clarkson’s Juliette—Clarkson finally gets a starring role!—is a woman journalist alone in an exotic locale. Cairo, in case you didn’t read the title. An exotic man comes into her life who is damned near as appealing as Javier Bardem. Will the two of them be together when the final credits roll?

Actually, I’m misrepresenting Cairo Time a bit here. The film is so low key, and its characters so circumspect, that a passion-driven ending seems out of the question.

Alexander Siddig’s Tareq is perhaps as charismatic and romantic as Bardem’s Brazilian in Bali, but he’s a self-proclaimed fatalist who doesn’t want to “seize the day.” He did seize it once before and got burned, so now he plays it cool. Unlike Roberts’ Liz Gilbert, Tareq remains true to his self-imposed limitations, and his deep eyes well with sadness when the movie ends. Surprisingly, Cairo Time winds up being his story more than Juliette’s.

But I’m continuing to misrepresent the movie. Because it’s not really any one character’s story. It’s about a sensual, if not exactly erotic threesome between a lonely American woman, an even lonelier Egyptian man, and the beautiful but melancholy city of the title.

Juliette is in Cairo for the first time to vacation with her U.N.-official husband, Mark. Tareq is Mark’s former colleague. When Mark gets caught up in a humanitarian crisis in Gaza and can’t join his wife in Cairo, he asks Tareq to show her around.

He was taking quite a chance, as Tareq has charm and looks to spare. But maybe Mark didn’t realize how close the chaotic and single-woman-adverse city would come to shattering his wife. She can’t walk through the intriguing casbah without being followed and harassed by men; she can’t really go anywhere without being stared at, so she has to turn to Tareq for nearly full-time companionship.

He responds with a courtliness that seems to hint at something deeper, and I wondered how long Juliette (why that loaded name?) would be able to resist his abundant charms. But before long I stopped really caring how she would respond. That’s because, despite Clarkson’s nice calibrated performance, Juliette isn’t a well-developed character. The state of her marriage is never made clear, and for a journalist who deals with substantial issues she seems surprisingly uneasy in unfamiliar surroundings.

The almost relationship and the regrets it inspires feel pleasingly real and down to earth, but it lacks that extra oomph that we go to the movies for.

No, the title character itself is the best reason to see Cairo Time. Director Ruba Nadda has made a valentine to the city. Like a valentine, the film looks on the bright side. Cairo’s pressing urban problems get a quick glance, but its enduring beauty gets the long takes. Which is as it should be in an escapist movie like this.

The Middle East’s bigger issues hover around the film’s edges, but Nadda never lets them in. Instead she gives us a city that is more romantic than her characters.