West Beyrouth

Having lived in North America my entire life, and only seeing the rest of the world through movies, books, and TV, I confess I have no experience of what the world is like when your home is a battlefield, especially in places like the Balkans and the Middle East, which have been sources of strife for several centuries. For many, of course, it's a source of tragedy. But what about those who may live on the edge of conflict, but aren't directly involved? For those who the challenge is simply to fit your day to day life around the war? HOPE AND GLORY was a film like that, though it was also about a little boy who could of course only see school was out, and WEST BEIRUT is like that as well; in fact, it retains the child-like view of HOPE AND GLORY but balances it with the adult viewpoint.

Writer-director Ziad Doueiri isn't interested in making a tract about the Lebanese Civil War(though he doesn't slight from its horrors, as in its opening scene of the bus massacre), but rather picking up the details of everyday life there. If there's a message, and Doueiri refreshingly doesn't hammer us over the head with one, it seems to be this; you do what you can. That's the attitude of the father of the main character Tarak; when both his wife and his son want to leave, he reminds them they really have no place else to go, these things have happened before, but they will stop, and life will go on. You can even find humor in your existence(as when Tarak escapes a battle by hiding in a car, which then takes him to what he thinks is a group of guerrillas but turns out to be something else entirely).

Doueiri, who was the second-unit cameraman on every film Quentin Tarantino directed, not only shows his visual flair, but also tells a compelling story, although with a few slow spots, and while the main characters are teens coming of age, we see the adult point of view as well; sometimes it's mocked(when Tarak's friend Omar complains his father thinks all Western culture is the devil's work, Tarak replies, puzzled, "How does Paul Anka come from Satan?"), but mostly it's taken seriously, and that, I think, helps make this a good film. Doueiri and his brother Rami(who plays Tarak) are ones to watch.

Right from the get go, you get immersed in West Beirut, especially if you grew up in this area of the world. From the fighter jets flying overhead, to the gun-totting militiamen you feel completely entangeled and immersed in the action and emotions, well perhaps not if you are an American. But worry not, the movie is simple to follow and you, sooner rather than latter, associate with the characters and the story being told: there is a bit of history (although a little inaccurate), lots of character building (Tarek did such and excellent job portraying a careless but yet affected youth) and a lot of drama especially from Tarek's parents who display some world class acting. The music was also right on track when it came to enhancing the story, whether the mood was going up, down, or portraying stillness.

For his first effort the Director (Ziad Doueiri) does a marvelous job at displaying his handy camera work and his craftsmanship in bringing out a rather complex story in a simple and close-to-the-heart way. It is true that this first effort lacked the polish of experience and confused some a bit (I was asked a lot of questions after the movie by my American friends) but its shortcomings are far outweighed by its style and class. I still do recommend this movie to all audiences, after all, how many Lebanese movies do manage to make it to the American market? None before, and probably none in a long time to follow, unless Mr. Doueiri is working on another great film. Is he? (I will keep my fingers crossed and tied)

West Beiruth is an excellent film. It reveals the true image of the civil war in Lebanon, through the eyes and adventures of two young friends, on the way to their adulthood. Experiencing love, friendship, a split society, and the horrors of war. West Beiruth is not a high budget movie, but it is very good in Directing, cinematography, script and acting. I would very much recommend it to everybody. It is a must see.

When making a film about divisive national conflicts, a familiar device is to frame the historical subject matter in a rites-of-passage narrative. This device produces a number of effects - a contrast between life as the audience knows it, and a historical reality they do not; by following a child's awakening, growing experience and knowledge of the world, it can reveal history and war as a lived experience, and not as something isolated in a textbook; it can show the progress of history as a kind of fall from innocence, as if any child's entering adulthood forces him to acknowledge shocking truths that are merely intensified in a war situation.

'West Beirut' tells the tale of Tarek, a gawky, humungously hootered smart aleck and class clown whom we first see disrupting assembly by blaring Lebanese over a megaphone during 'La Marseillaise'. For some reason, his liberal-left parents have sent him to a French school - this is the first historical nuance the viewer is expected to pick up on: if s/he doesn't, tough.

These opening sequences, messing about with his cousin Omar at school, furtively smoking and staring at attractive relatives, winding up obese neighbours, have something of the freewheeling joy found in a contemporaneous film about adolescence ('West Beirut' is set in 1975), Louis Malle's 'Murmur of the Heart'.

Except, even at this stage, everything is fraught, riven by division - the two languages Tarek speaks, the different religions among whom he co-exists; the different levels of space he inhabits. When he is punished and thrown out of class for disrupting the anthem, he witnesses the beginning of war, the shooting of the passengers on a bus. Again, we are expected to know which side is which, what they're fighting for etc. The main thing is, Tharek's expulsion and the beginning of the war seem to be intimately mixed, almost as if his transgression caused it; and so beings a pattern that shapes the film.

Everything you would expect from a rites-of-passage film is here, but tainted by the war environment - Tarek's first girlfriend is a Christian, making him aware of religious bigotry; his accidental visit to a brothel, his first sexual experience, brings alive to him the division of his city - it's always the subculture that suffers in situations like this. 1970s Lebanon is surprisingly Westernised and liberal, but a general retrenchment occurs, and Omar is expected to go to Mosque. It suddenly becomes dangerous to know the 'wrong' people, and the pressure of this division extends beyond friends into the family itself, between a pride that refuses to be bullied (Tarek's father), and a fear that just wants to get out (his mother).

One of the great things about this film is the way it brings you into a war situation - like us, the characters don't really know what's happening, they have no context - this is random, present-tense, frightening, where the morning cock crow is replaced by bombs as an alarm clock; where military 'protection' is no different from gangsterism. Doueiri's handheld style, used initially to heighten the vividness of youth, can easily adapt to the urgency of war, flitting between the two. The film never betrays either, never suggests childish games are somehow less important.

Omar is a young filmmaker, filming his friends and the city around him. One subplot centres around a film developer on the other side of the city border. A recurrent motif is of looking, being a voyeur, getting to know the world through accessing and interpreting visual information. This may be a biographical portrait of the director as a Young Artist. But, in its modest way, 'West Beirut' performs the same function as Nabokov's 'Speak Memory', using memory, nostalgia, autobiography, not as a comfy escape, but as an artistic weapon against a totalitarian present.

In 1974's Beirut Tarek is a normal kid – making Super 8 movies, hanging out with friend Omar and getting in trouble at school. Conflicts are fun distractions and even when civil war proper erupts between Muslims and Christians, it is all still a bit of a game to Tarek, giving him time off school and interesting things to see. However with the city split in two, Tarek's mother wants to leave but his father insists they will be fine to stay. Meanwhile Tarek befriends May, a Christian girl living in his building; but as the conflict deepens tensions rise and the war becomes less of a game and more of a tragedy.

I am usually interested in films that draw on personal experience because sometimes they can be very enjoyable and interesting and I accept the risk that some will be so personal that the director/writer loses sight of what he is doing and will make a film that doesn't translate well to those without the same degree of personal insight. So with West Beyrouth I was interested enough already and wasn't coming to it as some of the Tarantino completest that seem to have seen it. The film deals with a time and a place that I will not claim to fully understand or even know that much about – I have always been more interesting in political/religious wars that are closer to home for me than in the complexities of the Middle East etc but this film doesn't concern itself with making points; it is more about growing up during this time.

As such I felt it missed out on a chance to provide a wider understanding, although it did open the doors for a more personal view of the conflict. As the latter the film does work pretty well as I can't really think of another "coming-of-age" story set in such a place. The problem with it though is that, like a "you had to be there" joke, it doesn't totally translate to the screen in terms of being an engaging narrative. Yes, the period and place are very well delivered and the direction is blessed with real experience but the story didn't draw me in and it did feel like a collection of personal memories, strung together the best they could have been but not really that good a story. The cast are also pretty mixed. The director's own brother, Rami, is quite good in the lead but he is more "in" the scenes rather than being of great interest himself – or rather, I didn't feel he enabled me to emotionally buy into the film. Al Amin is gorgeous and seems a lot more natural, shame the film didn't use her more. Chamas was selected for the role after picking a fight with the crew and he is generally good enough to do the job, but for large sections it does feel like he is trying too hard and maybe overdoing his delivery. Supporting roles are all OK but these three were the key and they were generally OK if not anything wonderful.

Overall this is an OK film that is an interesting enough look at the conflict from the point of view of trying to grow up in it. The direction is good and has a personal touch along with a good eye for time and place but as writer Doueiri isn't as confident and his collection of memories don't manage to come together in an engaging narrative. Worth watching once if you're after a "teen" film that is different from the usual US collection of jocks and nerds, but not a completely satisfying film on the whole.