Lebanon - Telling Our War Stories
Nishee
A year ago, critics complained that Doueri’s West Beyrouth was a civil war
movie that didn’t deal with the war. Jim Quilty looks at a new film that does
just that
You have to own a story to tell it well. This challenge faces all film-makers,
but especially those addressing the Lebanese civil war. For 15 years the news
footage, the headlines, the stereotypes and cliches took possession of the
popular imagination. No surprise that they left a mark upon those who lived
here through the war. Some days after watching Civilisees Randa Chantal
Sabbag’s ambitious film about Lebanon’s war you’re left with an
impression of how difficult it must be to reclaim your imagination.
Ziad Doueri seemed to have no such problems. Doueri’s West Beyrouth is easily
the most successful postwar film to address the civil war. Critics most of
them foreigners, many a bit foolish complained that West Beyrouth didn’t
properly deal with the war. Popular Lebanese audiences had authenticity
problems with the appearance of Signale toothpaste and 1980s-era Mercedes.
Doueri, under no delusions that his piece was anything but a feature film,
shrugged off both lines of criticism. In the second place, he pointed out, only
the Lebanese care about what toothpaste Beirutis were using in 1975. In the
first place, West Beyrouth isn’t really about the civil war. This is an
important point. Doueri’s film is about a Muslim teenager’s relationship
with his best friend, his family, and a new friend who happens to be Christian.
The civil war provides the setting and drives the plot, but the story itself is
kept at a very intimate level.
Unfortunately, now that West Beyrouth is an accomplished fact, being
well-received among Anglo-Saxon audiences in London and New York, every
Lebanese feature film that follows will have to deal with both the critics and
comparisons to Doueri’s piece. Civilisees, will suffer from popular
comparison before the critics even open their mouths. This is unfair for a
number of reasons. But it is still helpful to compare Civilisees to West
Beyrouth in order to determine why a film with so much talent and potential
behind it did not work.
Doueri’s piece is a fine example of that commodity American film-makers
produce so well: well-crafted realism. It develops a few central characters,
surrounded by an array of flat characters who help carry the plot and develop
the central characters. Doueri’s efforts to keep the story intimate are aided
by his enclosing the action to West Beirut over a few years. West Beyrouth also
benefits from the director’s having an excellent eye as a cameraman. The
shots are sharp, the camera angles often interesting seldom experimental
and scenes are deftly edited.
Civilisees looks nothing like such easily consumed American realism. It is
reminiscent of theater of the absurd for want of a better comparison in
which the figures on stage are less convincing as “characters” than as
types. This in itself need not have condemned the film to failure. The
absurdist-inspired plays of Ziad Rahbani scathing social critiques of
wartime and postwar Lebanese society have successfully touched both the
nerves and the hearts of the Lebanese for years. Without knowing whether
Civilisees was inspired by the absurdists Rahbani or not the form Sabbag
chooses seems suitable enough for the story she wants to tell. The question is
whether the form translates well on film.
Sabbag wanted to call this film Les Autres (The Others), but she had to settle
for Civilisees (Civilised People). This is a pity because the original title
reverberates far better, within both the film and the Lebanese consciousness of
the war. Among some Lebanese there is still a popular myth that the civil war
was a regional war fought on Lebanese soil, that “the others” were
responsible for destroying the country.
Sabbag mixes this mythology with a fact about the civil war condition: when
they could afford to, the Lebanese left their war, leaving behind the ajanib
whether Asians and Egyptians who came here for work as servants or Europeans
who came with a curious, and unwarranted, air of invincibility.
These are the creatures that populate Civilisees. The result is a curiously
segmented world of outsiders not all of them ajanabi. So it is that
Filipina, Sri Lankan, and Egyptian domestics and an aggressively humanitarian
doctor from Medecins sans Frontieres mingle with marginal members of
Lebanon’s wartime society. These outsiders are combatants militiamen,
snipers, shifty drivers and the walking wounded a grief-stricken mother,
a wealthy expatriate woman returned to spend time with a lover. The camera
witnesses their interaction, but they volunteer no more justification for their
existence than human beings are able to provide for their presence or their odd
behavior.
Watching one scene run into another, the viewer is left with the impression
that the director is making a self-conscious effort to avoid imposing a
realistic storyline upon these encounters. The reasoning is sound and honest:
to impose a conventional plot upon the senseless episodes of the civil war is
to suggest that they made sense, which is simply untrue. In so far as there is
a plotline here, it is a circular morality tale: the Lebanese may leave, but
they always come back; the foreigners may want to leave, but they always
return; the ceasefires may come, but the war continues, making everyone an
outsider.
For all the unconventional characterization and strained plotting in this film,
some of Civilisees’ actors do render memorable performances. The luminous
Carmen Lebbos, playing one of two Egyptian maids, easily takes possession of
every scene she walks into. The same is true of the veteran actor from Burkina
Faso, Sotigui Kouyate. Other actors, though, are clearly in need of more
direction. The audience is often left wondering what particular actors are
doing in a given scene; and it seems the actors are often wondering the same
thing.
As the film unfolds, it is difficult to take your eyes off the screen. But the
curiosity does not derive from an interest in the film itself certainly not
its engrossing plot or its beautiful filming. You watch out of fascination with
that which the film is trying to render: Beirut and the war that afflicted it.
When the film finally ends, there is a twinge of regret as much for the
unrealized potential of the film as the tragedy of its subject. This is an
important film, and it should be widely screened and viewed. Not because of its
merits as a film, but because of its place in the process of healing.