In the popular Western imagination, Lebanon is most often invoked as a place of ruin and conflict, not romance and enchantment. The first feature film by filmmaker Chloé Mazlo, “Ciels du Liban”, is, among other things, an intriguing swing of the pendulum of representation.
Starring Italian actress Alba Rohrwacher, the film opens in 1977, as Alice, her character, leaves the country. On board a ship, she begins to write a letter. In the first of many visual surprises, the film switches gears, switching to stop-motion animation, as Alice recounts an oppressive childhood in 1950s Switzerland. After training to become an au pair, she takes on a mission as far from home as possible: in Beirut.
The Lebanese capital is represented here via diorama-like frames with vintage photos for the backgrounds. The effect is a storybook. So the story goes, for a while: Every day, Alice takes her baby to a little cafe, and there she meets Joseph (Wajdi Mouawad), a charming rocket engineer whom she will fall in love with and marry.
Their life is beautiful, for a time. Alice’s extended family is lovely, and the couple’s daughter, Mona, is sensitive and talented. The film’s treatment of the civil war that tears Lebanon apart and ultimately shatters Alice’s world is mixed. The depiction of how ordinary people try to shield themselves from civic strife (a scene in which a sleepover is interrupted by an air raid, for example) is sharp. Showing the warring factions as two small gangs on a street corner – divided by a pile of sandbags, with costumed fighters with masks and in one case a feather boa – seems flippant. The film’s open-mindedness wins out, however.
Sky of Lebanon
Unclassified. In French, with subtitles. Duration: 1h32. In theaters.
