The first 15 minutes is some of the best modern warfare footage I've seen, expertly showing the insanity of the war in Lebanon.
We follow a French photographer as he documents a war in which everyone is turning on everyone. Then the photographer is kidnapped, and we spend most of the film watching the horrors of life as a hostage.
Scene by scene it's beautifully done. His captors are a very varied bunch, some sympathetic, some psychotic, although we never get to really know any of them, and they do fall into 'types' a bit.
My biggest problem with the film was the lack of a bigger political context. Unlike, for example, 'Four Days in September', we never really understand what the captors want. For a while that Kafka-esque confusion is interesting, but by the end, it makes the film seem a bit limited in vision. The captors almost all seemed childlike, and not very bright. There was a touch of what almost felt like racism, very odd, considering the film-maker is himself Lebanese.
In the end, this was tense and exciting as a docudrama (it was based on a real case), but by not having more scope, just missed the chance to be a truly great film.
That said, it's well worth seeing, and I intend to re-visit it.
