10 December 2007
Interview
BEIRUT: The revenge motif is common in movies but it hasn't been much in evidence in Lebanon's cinematic output over last decade. It's not difficult to fathom why. Revenge was a common feature of the country's 1975-1990 Civil War. Despite the often high-minded, ideologically colored rhetoric of the actors involved, the conflict quickly descended into tribalism - indeed, for some players, descent wasn't necessary.
Enforced amnesia about the war was a common feature of reconstruction-era Lebanon and its forward-looking ideology. Calls for the sickening business of the past (and present) to be discussed - to prevent history from repeating itself - reverberated in left-leaning theaters, cafes and the cultural pages of certain newspapers, but not in public policy.
Several Lebanese films of various aesthetic worth have made use of the Civil War, whether for anti-war commentaries pitched to local tastes - Jean Chamoun's "Taif al-Madina," for instance - or as a setting for more universally appealing human dramas - as in Ziad Doueri's "West Beirut." Secular humanists, these filmmakers and their contemporaries allude to the bald criminality of the Civil War but don't dwell upon it, let alone build an entire film around it.
Filmmakers who are not of the war generation, meanwhile, often want to escape the narrow precincts of the conflict. Nadine Labaki's candy-coated (and notably successful) "Caramel (Sikkar al-Banat)" ignores the matter altogether.
Borhane Alaouie is intimidated neither by civil war nor by the conventions of genre film. A 36-year veteran of the film trade, his most lauded feature film - 1981's "Beirut al-Liqa" ("Beirut Meeting"), which took the Berlin film festival's Golden Bear in 1982 - was shot in Civil War Beirut.
His new feature "Khalass," his third, is a genre film with a social conscience and a taste for the absurd. On December 6, the film opened a month-long run in Beirut at the Metropolis Art Cinema in Hamra (along with select Empire theaters). It is also screening in competition for the fourth annual Dubai International Film Festival, which opened on December 9 and runs through December 16.
Alaouie's new film revolves around three characters of the war generation. Ahmad (Fadi Abi Khalil) is a former leftist militiaman-cum-journalist. One of Beirut's walking wounded, Ahmad has plastered his walls with images of pre-war Beirut and comrades' martyrs posters.
Ahmad's best pal is a cameraman called Robby (Raymond Hosny). Disgusted with politics, he now films only children and cats. Ahmad's long-time but estranged lover is Abir (Natasha Achkar), once an aspiring film actress who currently works in an antiques shop.
All three are going about their lives more or less unhappily when catastrophe strikes Ahmad and Robby simultaneously.
Robby is shooting a series of testimonials from street kids and orphans and the audience finds him in the midst of an interview with a boy named Wissam. He gives him a few dollars for his trouble and the boy runs off, excited, only to fall victim to a hit-and-run. Robby and the boy are turned away from several hospitals because he has no money for treatment. Wissam dies.
Ahmad, meanwhile, gets chewed out by his editor because he refuses to provide sensational photos of the misery cases he covers and ends up getting the sack. Then, Abir tells him that she's going to marry her boss Monsieur Raymond, whom she used to deride as an antiquities looter. Afterward, for good measure, Raymond's bodyguards beat him up.
Having already decided to leave Beirut to live in the mountains, Ahmad now contemplates suicide on the cliffs of Raouche - not one of the stronger scenes of the film - but instead decides to p*** on it, literally.
Ahmad and Robby hatch a plot to help one another exact revenge. Robby wants to avenge Wissam's death and help the boy's widowed mother, his target being a hospital manager who turned them away.
When they do take him out, they discover he's got a fortune stashed in his couch. Robby dispenses his share of the dosh, Robin Hood-fashion, to various needy folk. His beneficence takes a surreal turn when he holds a richly catered feast, violinist and all, for the city's stray cats in Downtown Beirut's Roman ruins.
Ahmad has his own hit list. First he wants to be rid of a man named William al-Hannawi (literally "The Willing William"), the communist party chief who turned his back on his principles and let himself be bought into the nouveau-riche reconstruction culture. Then it will be Abir and Raymond's turn.
Stealing a car, they disguise themselves as well-off Gulf tourists and check into one of Beirut's posh hotels, specifically asking for the room next door to the one they know William frequents.
Before taking William out, they don Che Guevara masks, which, given the fact that they're still dressed in Khaliji dishdashis, gives this scene a comically surreal touch as well. They drop a copy of William's book "People of the Revolution" into a silver ice bucket, pour booze (and a bit of poison) over it and offer him a choice: Take a bullet or "drink the ink" of his past words. He does, and dies.
The balance of the film is dedicated to Ahmad and Robby figuring out what to do with Abir and Raymond, and how to live in a country that doesn't want them.
"Khalass" is a fictional story but Alaouie says its core characters - Ahmad, William and Abir - are based on known Lebanese figures. The brutal authenticity of the protagonists' respective back-stories and the predicaments that push all three to desperate measures is the film's great strength. These are not beautiful characters and they haven't been cast that way - though Natasha Achkar is physically attractive, she plays Abir as a woman forced to marry before she gets too far past the pinnacle of her beauty.
This mix of verity, surrealism and happy-go-lucky bloodletting may be difficult for some viewers to comprehend or - given Lebanon's present political environment - to stomach.
In conversation, Alaouie places "Khalass" in the context of a career in feature and documentary films dedicated to the human condition in Lebanon and the Middle East as a whole.
"A film's basic criteria is whether it can survive the passage of time," he says. "'Kfar Qassem' [his 1971 feature about the infamous Israeli massacre of Palestinian villagers in 1956] is still being screened and televised 30 years after it was made.
"'Beirut al-Liqa' [which looks on as a West Beirut man and an East Beirut woman fail to communicate, despite their best efforts to do so] is still being shown 25 years after it was made. These films didn't die after they left the cinema. This suggests there is some independent life in them, that they can evolve with changing audiences.
"'Khalass' is a testimonial film," he says, "a film about loss. In 'Beirut al-Liqa,' this feeling of loss is only beginning to be felt. Shot in 1981, the story wasn't done yet. In 'Khalass,' loss reaches its apogee."
It is a heartfelt, at times perplexing, film, radiating anger and challenging audiences to see beyond the appearance of things. Some, particularly those enthralled by the more light-hearted work emerging from Lebanon's younger filmmakers, will likely find it disagreeably bleak - whether for its motifs of vengeance and emigration, its dark representation of Lebanese society or the way Alaouie brings the story to a close.
Though there seem to be smirking asides to "reconstruction Beirut," Alaouie says the film isn't meant as a critique of the Hariri years (the late, former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri being the chief architect of the era). "When we were shooting the film in 2002," he says, "people still believed in this idea."
Though he has left the end of the film open to interpretation, he personally prefers to read it happily. In any case, he continues, "this is a story of the war generation. It only concerns those who fought and were surrounded, suffocated and broken by war.
"People used to say they wanted to forget about the war. Are they saying it today? When this film was shot it was true that everyone wanted to forget the war but nowadays war is all people talk about." He laughs wryly. "Perhaps this is why the film took so long to finish. Divine provenance."
"Khalass" is currently screening at the Metropolis Art Cinema in Hamra and select Empire theaters throughout Beirut
