West Beirut
aka West Beyruth

Screening: 5 September, 6:30pm

Lebanon/France
1998

Director/Screenplay: Ziad Doueiri
Production co: 3 B Productions, La Sept Arte,
Producers: Rachid Bouchareb, Jean Brëhat
Cinematography: Ricardo Jacques Gale
Editor: Dominique Marcombe
Production designer: Hazmê Hasrallah
Sound: Nicolas Cantin, Thierry Sabatier
Music: Stewart Copeland
Tarek: Rami Doueiri
Omar: Mohammad Chamas
May: Rola Al Amin
Hala: Carmen Lebbos
Riad: Joseph Bou Nassar
Nahida: Liliane Nemry
Madame: Leila Karam
Hassan: Mahmoud Mabsout
In Arabic and French with English subtitles
105 mins
DVD
M cert (low level offensive language)

Bombed-out cities make wonderful playgrounds, and it's this paradox which Ziad Doueiri (who himself grew up in the war-torn Beirut of the mid-70s) explores to such rich effect in his debut feature. While their parents are tearing their hair out in grief and fear, the children run amok, relishing the anarchy which war brings. Doueiri's background as Quentin Tarantino's assistant cameraman has been much hyped by the publicists, but West Beirut owes less to Reservoir Dogs than to the kind of naturalistic, street-level cinema patented by the neorealists in the 50s. Doueiri is equally adept at showing the tensions between neighbours living on top of one another as the divisions within the city as a whole.

There is also conflict between generations while Christians battle against Muslims, adolescents are pitted against elders. In one of the very first scenes, the teenage protagonist Tarek refuses to sing the French anthem at his school assembly. Robustly played by the director's younger brother Rami Doueiri, Tarek is a renegade with the same disdain for authority that Truffaut's Antoine Doinel showed in The 400 Blows (1959). For all his bravado, he is sensitive enough to understand the strains the war is placing on his parents' marriage. Doueiri never lets us forget what a calamity the war is.

West Beirut is not only a chronicle of a city at war but also a rites-of-passage story and a study of young friendship. Tarek and his friend Omar roam around the city in search of adventure, sometimes with a young Christian girl in tow. This is very much an insider's vision of Beirut. The director knows the city as intimately as the people who inhabit it. The storytelling isn't exactly impressionistic, but we're given little sense of time passing or of a narrative building up to a conventional ending. Instead, Doueiri offers us a series of lyrical snapshots of the world of his childhood. The film finishes in oblique fashion, with the implication that one of Tarek's family died in the civil war. Doueiri doesn't need to spell matters out the sense of loss and yearning felt by those caught in this divided city is always apparent.

Geoffrey Macnab, Sight And Sound, 8/99

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