26 October 2010
BEIRUT: Like many Mediterranean port cities, Beirut has long hosted a large resident expatriate community – from French consuls general, to Greek prostitutes, to Maltese gangsters. Unlike some other cities in the MENA region nowadays, there is still a thriving culture of trans-national miscegenation here.
Day-to-day life in Beirut – where contact among foreigners, local foreigners and locals tends to be complicated by layers of misperception and misrepresentation – is rich in comic potential.
Elie Khalifé and Alexandre Monnier tap some of that resource with their much-awaited feature-film debut “Ya Noussak,” which is enjoying its theatrical release in Beirut after its world premier at the Beirut International Film Festival a couple of weeks back.
The film is narrated by a fellow named Rudy (Siegfried Terpoorten), a 30-something Swiss-German who, as he informs you, migrated to Lebanon out of love (for a Lebanese woman) and stayed on after that relationship collided with a Lebanese businessman.
He operates a little takeaway restaurant called “Swiss Pizza,” which, it seems, doesn’t run with the Swiss-German precision that he’d like. Marwan and Ali, his shiftless delivery boys, are likely to goof off chasing after women in the midst of a delivery – leaving Rudy to deliver himself, trying to find directions to some street of which (this being Beirut) no one has heard, but to which people are still happy to give elaborate directions.
Marwan and Ali are minor characters, but their innocence of boy-girl relations – mingled with Ali’s pretence of worldliness – supplement the movie’s comic relief.
Completing the Swiss Pizza lonely-hearts club is 30-something Mona (Zeina Daccache). As this is Beirut, where society and economy conspire against independence from the family, she still lives with her parents and so must suffer the indignity of being shopped around to middle-aged Lebanese expats, passing through town in search of a young wife.
It is fairly evident from early on that Rudy and Mona are destined to hook up. Khalifé, who wrote the script, tries to make the path to that inevitable conjunction as entertaining and broadly comic as possible. He festoons the film with anecdotes of boys and girls misunderstanding one another.
Rudy’s life revolves around his efforts to get his head around (and leg over) Lebanese women – a subject that, some say, has preoccupied many’s the foreign resident of Beirut before Rudy was written.
The film opens with a close shot of the Swiss in a post-coital snuggle with a young woman (Rita Ibrahim). An indecisive lady – depending on her mood, she prefers to be called Sonia or Sousou – she veers, mid-cuddle, from affection to anxiety, to hostility.
A while later, Sousou comes off as slightly mad, sitting in bed, fully clothed, smoking, drinking a beer and rattling on in Arabic while Rudy, who doesn’t speak Arabic, lies beside her, bewildered.
She seems (bizarrely) indignant at Rudy’s suggestion that they have sex and flees his bed. She reappears long enough to explain that she’s engaged and will be married next month.
This news compels Rudy to stop sleeping with Sousou and she drops off the radar. This in turn compels Georges – Sousou’s much-older fiancé, who has been fully aware of Rudy – to ring him every time she disappears.
As the foreign man at the center of the movie, Rudy becomes a lightning rod for an array of comic stereotypes of Lebanese women. Friendly Toufiq and flirtatious Micheline, a landlord-like couple who regularly walk into his flat uninvited, are a case in point. Toufiq is much older than his wife and it turns out Micheline wants to bed Rudy; when he refuses to cooperate, she tries to blackmail him into doing so.
After Sousou’s unceremonious departure, our hero finds himself in a Gemmayzeh bar with friends, being entertained by Dana (Dana), a jailbait performer redolent of Haifa Wehbe who we encounter earlier in the film when star-struck Ali delivers a pizza to her place.
While dancing with Dana, Rudy attracts the attentions of a sultry, and anonymous, barmaid (Alexandra Kahwagi), whose idea of foreplay is a bit of rough trade followed by melting a wad of Swiss chocolate over her lover’s chest with matches. When Rudy protests, she pouts and calls him “old fashioned.”
The anonymous choco-matrix re-enters the story when Mona turns up to rent a spare room in her flat. As soon as Mona tells her she works for a Swiss fellow named Rudy, her new flatmate knows exactly who he is (“Beirut,” as is well-known locally, “is such a village”), but she refrains from spilling the beans.
It’s not only Rudy who suffers at the hands of the opposite sex. Mona must struggle through her own travails – as when a cab driver who’s old enough to be her granddad assumes (by virtue of Mona’s skirt and fishnet stockings) that she’ll be willing to have sex with him.
It’s this (apparently not uncommon) encounter, here rendered comically, that incites the moral and law-abiding Rudy to intervene to see that justice is done – an initiative that naturally lands him in prison – and brings a sort of comic closure to his affair with Sousou.
“Ya Noussak” is an amusing and intelligent little romp. The film’s subtitles translate the title as “Bad Boy,” but (naturally) not all Lebanese would agree on this translation. Some suggest it’s often used to mean “Hey Sweetie,” something a woman is as likely say to her child as to her lover.
This reflects something of the childlike ambivalence of Rudy’s existence, whether as a foreigner living in Beirut or as a man relating to women.
Like Khalifé’s earlier work – a series of short films, some of them co-directed with Monnier – “Ya Noussak” mingles the loose-limbed no-budget aesthetic common to art house cinema with popular film’s fondness for caricature-driven, socially grounded comedy. Aficionados of the European independent scene will hear echoes of Holland’s Eddy Terstall and the early work of Sweden’s Joseph Fares in Khalifé and Monnier’s collaborations.
Yet “Ya Noussak” falls into a problematic cinematic niche. Those who patronize the work of Lebanon’s art house filmmakers may be disappointed with Khalifé and Monnier’s confection – since those artists tend to be critical of stereotypes (malign or benign) and are averse to the broad application of comedy.
Like “Sukkar Banat,” Nadine Labaki’s vastly successful 2007 feature-film debut, “Ya Noussak” focuses its lens tightly upon the profane side of the Lebanese capital.
Putting aside the intervention of the Lebanese police near the end of the movie, the entire political-sectarian-geo-political matrix that makes Lebanese folks so miserable has been flensed away from this version of Beirut.
As such, “Ya Noussak” falls into a specific category of movie that seeks to complement, if not undermine, common media representations of Lebanon as a country completely populated by fundamentalist whack jobs and militants.
“Ya Noussak” suffers from comparison to “Sukkar Banat” because it lacks the Vogue Magazine-ish gloss of that movie’s cinematography. Entertaining and cunningly chosen as the selected anecdotes are, the situations in this slim (65-minute) feature sometimes seem meagerly developed, living up to neither their dramatic potential nor to Khalifé’s energetic comic imagination.
That said, “Ya Noussak” is a fun film to watch, and it’s hard not to sometimes nod your head in recognition.
“Ya Noussak” is currently screening in Lebanon in Circuit Planete cinemas. For more information try +961 1 292 192.
Copyright The Daily Star 2010.
