Stitched scenes, visible seams: 'I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Grave'

11 October 2006

Review

BEIRUT: Fadia, the mousy psychiatrist with a shy smile, darting eyes and a bow made of twine in her hair. Rola, the hotel manager who smokes a stubby cigar, has the manner of a temptress and gestures with fingertips dipped in polish so dark as to appear black. Raghida, the wry gynecologist with a baritone smoker's cough, arched eyebrows and an arsenal of world-weary expressions.

The principal characters in Hala Alabdalla and Ammar Albeik's "I Am the One Who Brings Flowers to Her Grave" - which screened twice over the weekend as one of the more interesting and unexpected selections in this year's Beirut International Film Festival - become known to viewers only gradually over the course of the film's 110 minutes.

"I Am the One" is neither a narrative feature nor a sociopolitical documentary. Rather, it is an intensely personal essay made from disparate sounds and lo-fi images, all loosely strung together with bits of language - anecdotes, recollections, poems, captured conversations and fragmented storytelling. It resembles a collage set in motion more so than cinema per se.

"I Am the One" is also a film turned inside out. There is no smooth sheen of production of the surface, only the rough edges of raw material flipped over for all to see. The camerawork is jerky and jarring, the editing abrupt. Alabdalla and Albeik shot their footage on two digital cameras and then mashed all the material together, converting everything into black and white.

The final film mixes interior shots of subjects speaking at claustrophobically close range with exterior shots of expansive landscapes. The details of aging skin, smudged makeup, awkward pauses, outbreaks of laughter and faces contorting in tears, grief and regret jump around sequences of a black churning sea, spider webs clung to a bridge and a silent courtyard strewn with stray branches. "I Am the One" is composed in its entirety of interviews, a few stills, material recorded while scouting for locations and a meeting between the filmmakers and Marcel Khalife, who contributed the score. In other words, the making of the film is laid bare as the film itself.

If this were all done in the interest of pretentious experimentation, "I Am the One" would be unbearable - a rambling, amateur video masquerading as an artwork in an age of the vastly unskilled. Serious aesthetes are likely to find the film appalling to watch. Ultimately, though, and as counterintuitive as it may sound, the content holds the form together. The depth, power and rawness of the material saves "I Am the One" from ruin.

So what is the film about exactly? By increments, viewers learn that Fadia, Rola and Raghida have all been imprisoned. So too has the filmmaker, Hala Alabdalla. And so too has her husband, the Syrian painter Youssef Abdelki.

Abdelki's story is woven delicately into the film. While Alabdalla stays on in Syria, Albeik travels to Paris, where Abdelki has lived in exile for over 20 years. Albeik films him painting, savoring his coffee, talking on the phone. One day he strolls down to a public square with his daughter. Giving the camera a conspiratorial wink, he opens the brown paper bag he is carrying to reveal a set of painted protest signs emblazoned with Syria's name. A small, somber demonstration ensues.

When the film breaks open to document Abdelki's tender, jubilant homecoming in Damascus, one realizes that Abdelki is the only clear narrative thread in evidence here. (His return to Syria in April 2005 was noteworthy in that it was among the first of several such repatriations that signified an unofficial amnesty for scores of exiled dissidents and human rights activists whom the Syrian regime had previously considered persona non grata.)

Yet "I Am the One" offers no clear indictment of Syrian rule, referred to only briefly and by coincidence, when the camera locks its lens on a sticker of Hafez al-Assad here, a poster of Bashar al-Assad there. It sheds no light of the tactics of a hermetic, often despotic regime. It presents no statistics about political prisoners or prisoners of conscience in Syria, whose numbers Human Rights Watch estimates to be in the range of 2,500 still (and that's putting aside all those questions about the 17,000 people who went missing in Lebanon during the Civil War and on Syria's watch).

Watching "I Am the One," you never learn, in any sort of straightforward fashion at least, why these women or this man have been jailed. The peppered use of the word "comrade" offers a few clues, as do the occasional evocations of justice, democracy, oppression, poverty and suffering. Several of the subjects interviewed throughout the film belong to minority communities of one sort or another. But as a viewer you are basically left to piece this puzzle together on your own.

Rather than the macropolitical context, "I Am the One" concerns itself with the micropolitical impact imprisonment has had on these characters and their lives. Fadia, Rola and Raghida literally wear their suffering on their skin. Because Alabdalla knows them well - you come to realize they are all old friends - their confidential girl talk eventually cuts extremely close to the bone.

What have these women lost? How do they measure the distance between who they could have been before and who they have become since?

On the crest of middle age and looking back on their childhood, their adolescence and their young adulthood, they have certainly lost their idealism, their hope, their invincibility. As Rola explains, as a young woman she was unstoppable. Now, she says, "life has made me yield, has made me yield a little, not much, just a little." For all her minimizing of effect, it's a profoundly brutal and painful confession, to admit that one has been beaten, has lost.

As women who are aging, they have also, to a certain extent, lost their youth and their beauty. Toward the end of the film Alabdalla rigs her camera to her bathroom mirror and the way she rubs her hands over her face speaks volumes, even as the scene passes in silence. Raghida speaks vividly of the loneliness she encountered when she was released, only to find all her former colleagues gone or scattered. Rola hits the film's emotional peak when she explains how the smell of rain hitting earth in France sent her reeling back to Syria. The charge she gives the word for earth, ard, over and over, is so strong you not only smell it, you taste it, too. In making a film that clearly necessitated Albeik's collaboration, egging on and encouragement, Alabdalla is at pains to point out that everyone involved has lost poetry from their lives.

"I Am the One" is a creeper. It grows on you. The pace is slow and strange in the beginning but quickens toward the end, when Alabdalla finally, as if opening a dam, tells her own story, or rather, the love story between her and Abdelki. Here the film recaptures that headlong rush of youth which Rola previously relegated to the past.

Alabdalla and Albeik's film debuted last month at the Venice Film Festival, where it scooped up a special prize. These screenings in Beirut mark only its second international appearance. The film's appeal for local audiences is obvious. For all the empty rhetoric of familiarity (and loaded rhetoric of hostility), cultural traffic between Syria and Lebanon remains thin. "I Am the One" - named for a single line from a poem by Daed Hadad, who died in Syria in 1991 - takes that tired old notion that the personal is political and turns it on its head. The results, by no means beautiful or seductive, are compelling because they fill an enormous void. In doing so, they also expose the most intimate of wounds and share them.