27 September 2011

BEIRUT: So far this has been a pretty good year for Nadine Labaki. “Wa Halla l’Wayn?” (Where Do We Go Now?), the Lebanese writer-director-actor’s sophomore feature debuted this spring in the Cannes film festival’s prestigious Un Certain Regard selection. Though the film took no prizes from Cannes’ jury, it was a crowd-pleaser and was awarded the 2011 François Chalais Prize – an off-competition award which lauds movies dedicated to life affirmation and journalism.

More recently, the film screened at the Toronto International Film Festival where it was awarded the Cadillac People’s Choice Award. This is an audience award but a significant one: TIFF is North America’s biggest film festival, an industry-driven beast where pundits begin their speculations about how which films will fare at the Academy Awards. Appropriately enough, “Wa Halla l’Wayn?” has been selected to represent Lebanon in the Oscars’ competition for best foreign film.

The film’s life on the international festival circuit will likely extend into 2012 but it has now begun its commercial run in Lebanon. Given that it traffics in the same light-handed romantic comedy that earned Labaki such affection with “Caramel,” her 2007 debut, there seems little reason to doubt that Beirut audiences will agree with those in Toronto. Labaki says that TIFF was commercially rewarding for her film.

“I still can’t reveal the name of the distributor because they haven’t yet signed the final contract,” Labaki smiles, “but we have a very big distributor in the States, which is very good for the film. We’ve sold the film virtually everywhere.”

Though “Where Do We Go Now?” and “Caramel” are both romantic comedies – and though she shared her writing duties with more or less the same team as the first film – the new movie departs from the previous mould on several fronts.

For one thing it takes up the very Lebanese theme of sectarian conflict (something “Caramel” ignored) while removing any reference to “Lebanon.” As if to compensate for placing its characters in such stern circumstances, Labaki lightens the gloom with moments of choreography and music, whether in the form of a dream sequence love duet or a hashish-infused kitchen chorus.

“The writing process always comes from a need to express myself,” she says, “a certain obsession or frustration or questions. When I wrote ‘Sukkar al-Banat’ it was about me being a woman living in the Middle East, observing the women around me, not understanding certain things while understanding others, asking a lot of questions about who we are, what we are, how we look at the world. Writing about those women was a sort of therapy for me.

“The same is true here. When my co-writers and I started thinking about the next film, it was a coincidence that the events of May 2008 happened. [In a matter of] hours we felt that we were on the verge of a new civil war. At least that’s how I felt. I sensed how people who have lived in the same neighborhood for years, who shared the same food, can become enemies in hours because in the next neighborhood people who belong to the same political party are fighting.”

Labaki says she felt the need to “face the absurdity of this situation. I was pregnant at that time and I think [that makes] you look at the world in a different way. If I wasn’t, I don’t think I would’ve paid attention to what was happening in the same way – of your baby and what kind of world he’ll grow up in and [how it] can become a warzone in hours.

Labaki says the movie’s core narrative revolved around a mother with an 18-year-old son who would do anything to keep her son from picking up a weapon and going into the street to fight. Unlike “Caramel,” however, which was set in a quiet Beirut neighbourhood, the street in “Where Do We Go Now?” is that of a remote village, one further isolated from the rest of the world by a destroyed bridge.

It’s a story-telling technique that imbues the plot with an allegorical quality – remaking Lebanon as a village without ever mentioning “Lebanon” as such.

Labaki says the decision to set the film in a village grew out of plot writing considerations as much as the practical difficulties of shooting such a story in Beirut.

“For me this village is the world,” she says. “I needed to locate this place to show how external events influence the absurd way people act and think. You can’t isolate an urban neighborhood this way …The story begins like a fairytale so you don’t know where the events are happening, in order to make it more universal. [I don’t want] to make it a specific Lebanese problem because I have felt this problem everywhere.”

Labaki says it was hoped the musical component of the film would also contribute to its fairytale quality.

“It’s something I’ve always wanted to experiment with,” she says, “though I don’t really like classical musicals. I thought it was a good idea to do it in this film because it also gives you this fairytale quality, not knowing if this is true or not.

“It’s also inspired by all the women I’ve seen until now who are wearing black who I’ve seen express themselves so violently over the bodies of their sons and husbands. I’ve seen them on TV, I’ve seen them in my family, in my neighborhood, hitting themselves, tearing their clothes … It’s an image that’s always in my head. It’s sort of a tribute to them.”

For all of its fairytale musical-comic elements, “Where Do We Go Now?” is a story of Lebanon’s Civil War, a period in the country’s history whose readings are still highly contentious. If there is one thing that may stick in the craw of some viewers, it’s the premise that all the problems in this village microcosm of Lebanon come from outside, a strong echo of the notion that Lebanon’s Civil War was a series of foreign wars fought on Lebanese soil, a conflict that can be blamed on someone else.

“How can we say that we didn’t have a civil war between us?” Labaki avers. “We had that war. We were the ones fighting each other … brothers in the same family were fighting each other … You know we’ve had many wars and one of them we fought against each other. Another example of that is what happened in May 2008. You can’t say it was somebody else fighting here. It was us.”

Nadine Labaki’s “Where Do We Go Now?” is screening in Beirut in Circuit Planete and Circuit Empire cinemas.

Copyright The Daily Star 2011.