13 December 2008

Review

BEIRUT: Lebanon's peculiar recent history has inspired any number of foreign movies, many of them American and European. These include blockbusters like Tony Scott's 2001 Brat Pitt-Robert Redford vehicle "Spy Game," a significant portion of which was filmed in a back-lot masquerading as war-torn Beirut, and such smaller movies as Ludi Boeken and Michael Lerner's Civil War film noir "Deadlines," from 2004.

Some of the broadest renderings of the Lebanese condition, however, have an Egyptian accent. Take the late Samir al-Ghoussayni's 1972 cheesefest "The Hamra Cats," a film which sets an Egyptian-style morality narrative within a counter-culture Beirut inhabited by plump Egyptians.

More recently, in 2001, Egyptian director Mohammad Abu Seif (working with a story by Sharif al-Shoubashi and Ashraf Mohammad) gave us "Batal min al-Janoub," (Hero from the South) about the infant son of a Coptic couple vacationing in Beirut in 1975 (the year the Civil War got rolling) who, when separated from its parents after an explosion, is raised by a Lebanese Muslim couple, growing up to join the resistance.

So it is that Samir Habchi's "Beirut Open City" belongs to a hallowed pop cinematic tradition. A movie from Misr International, the Egyptian production company founded by the late Youssef Chahine and run by Gabriel Khoury, it features a mostly Lebanese cast but stars the Egyptian actor Khaled al-Nabawi.

The film is set in mid-1990s Beirut, after the long Civil War was officially ended but before peace was reutilized, when local representatives of Washington and Damascus and their entourages were seen to be behaving more or less with impunity.

Nabawi plays Khaled, a young Egyptian filmmaker in Lebanon to research and write a feature film about political oppression in the Arab world. When an informant asks him why he chose to make the film in Lebanon rather than Egypt, say, he replies that Lebanon is freer.

One of Khaled's main informants is a self-styled anti-Syrian dissident named Hamid (Rodney Haddad). Though he expresses some hesitation about being seen talking to the filmmaker, let alone being filmed, Hamid does depict what it's like to be detained and tortured by the security services in Lebanon.

Khaled also has a well-connected girlfriend named Rana, through whom the filmmaker cultivates ties with the thuggish security team surrounding the US ambassador in Lebanon. A couple of subplots spring from this connection.

It turns out Rana is histrionically insecure, and grows acutely more so the more time the couple spends with her glamorous-looking pal Youmna (model-turned-vocalist Cyrene Abdelnour). At one point in the film it seems Youmna fancies Khaled - which gives Habchi an opportunity to have her writhe in a bit of Lebanese-style belly dance, reiterating one of the region's fondest clich?s about Lebanese women being harlots.

Khaled's contact with the US Embassy is a Lebanese nicknamed "Rambo" (Fadi Abi Samra), who runs the ambassador's motorcade - here realistically represented barreling through Beirut streets with gunmen, automatic rifles drawn, leaning out of the doors and windows.

One day, while bullying other drivers off the road, Rambo's boys shoot and kill a young man from the Bekaa Valley - a region only a couple of hours east of Beirut, but where tribal bonds are still strong and largely unchallenged by alternative means of association.

The victim's family immediately decides to go to war with their habitual clan rivals in the Bekaa, but clan war is averted at the last minute when it's discovered who's really responsible. A US Embassy official (Joseph Bou Nasr) duly turns up at the unfortunate victim's funeral (whose reception line is accompanied by a uniformed marching band) and tells the chief the ambassador regrets the accident and wants to put things right.

The chieftain informs the official he wants to avoid further bloodshed too, and will be pacified if the ambassador and his security team come unarmed to the village and pray at his son's grave, in return for which he will guarantee their safety. The embassy man replies that the ambassador is too powerful a man to show such humility but, shrugging, promises to convey the chief's peace terms.

A subaltern plot is then set into motion to exact revenge against the ambassador's security team. It is into this plot that Khaled, whose research finds him filming the ambassador's convoy as often as he films as the security forces' draconian responses to anti-Syrian demonstrations, falls.

It will surprise no one to learn that "Beirut Open City" does not live up to the promise of "Rome Open City," Roberto Rossellini's post-WWII classic, which Habchi references in his English-language title. Habchi's movie is not without things to recommend it. Milad Tauk's cinematography avoids the skincare-ad glossiness that destroys the credibility of some of the region's serious film efforts, but the film's principal strength lies in the writing.

Designer brands, party logos and other visual codes being what they are, foreigners wanting to decode this place often struggle to discern Lebanese appearances from realities. Reportage from the bombing campaigns and other unpleasantness the country has undergone is habitually replete with foreigner-bewildering incongruities - the popular devotion to both militant religiosity, for instance, and mini-skirts, push-up bras and nightclubbing.

Habchi's conceit to comment upon the vagaries of interpretation and narrative lies in Khaled's script-writing efforts. Hand-written pages from his screenplay festoon the walls of his salon. Some audience members may note this cue and - supposing they respond at all - think, like the pretty but vacuous Youmna, "Cool."

Others will recognize such tacking-up of pages on walls as a reference to a number of older films, the most recent (and accomplished) of which is 2002's "Divine Intervention," Elia Suleiman's stylish contemplation of segmentation and alienation in Occupied Palestine.

"Beirut Open City" thus begins as a straightforward thriller, following naturalist conventions, but it eventually veers into something else. Scenes unfold, only to be stopped and replayed again, somewhat changed.

By the time this happens a couple of times - as when Youmna drops around Khaled's place and says "Cool" in two different drafts - audience members will realize that what is being played out is not what's happening but what's being narrated. It's an inherently unreliable naturalism, if only because it's being told from the perspective of Khaled, who is literally in the process of composing it.

It's not the first time a writer has fiddled with such conceits to make a story's unreliability part of the story itself. It's an approach that's fitting when representing Lebanon, where a superfluity of local yarns, neo-feudal folk tales, partisan propaganda, security service dissimulation and conspiracy theories are recounted without the counterpoint of a national (or, for that matter, rational) narrative.

The concept and writing of "Beirut Open City" are head and shoulders above its execution and it's a pity its other components fall flat by comparison. The soundtrack is unfortunately emotive. There are some creditable performances - Rodney Haddad's supporting role as a faux dissident may be his best performance yet.

Nabawi, the leading man, holds up his end of the contract but it seems he doesn't yet have the depth and range to depict the complexities of a character that is not only a pretty face but the audience's puppet master. Perhaps Habchi's direction isn't probing enough to provoke such a performance.

The promotional material for his film suggests Habchi took 14 years to make "Beirut Open City." Audiences should look forward to his next piece of writing.

Copyright The Daily Star 2008.