9 Mar 2022

Review - Skies of Lebanon

From At The Movies, 7:30 pm on 9 March 2022

Skies of Lebanon is the romantic story of a young Swiss woman who went to Beirut to work and fell in love - with a professor and the land of Lebanon. 

Simon Morris: Recently in New Zealand, we got a very small taste of the worst thing that can befall a country - irrational civil war.

It was soon over, thankfully, but it was just not something we were used to - people who look the same, who sound the same, suddenly getting it into their heads that the other side are monsters.

Sadly this is all too common in many other places in the world - notably the Middle East.

The East Mediterranean state of Lebanon is little but old. Its history predates most of the Bible, and in later years its capital, Beirut, became known as the "Paris of the Middle East".

In the film Skies of Lebanon, that's the aspect of the country that attracts a young Swiss woman called Alice.

Alice's early story is rather Sound of Music - trained in the mountains by dour nuns to be a nanny, but itching to get away.

In her case, the offer was to work in Beirut in the late Fifties. As soon as she got off the boat, she was welcomed enthusiastically.

"Enthusiastically" is putting it mildly! She's embraced, then given a life by a woman dressed as a cedar tree.

Skies of Lebanon is fond of visual metaphors - Alice's time in Switzerland was portrayed in joyless plasticine.

Alice settles in and gets into the habit of morning coffee at a favourite Beirut café, where she exchanges silent glances with the equally shy Joseph.

Joseph is a university professor - a rocket scientist, no less - and their romance is treated as a whimsical fairy-tale - the sort of thing that made another French film, Amelie, so appealing.

Before you know it, Alice and Joseph fall in love and marry - which means Alice also joins Joseph's exuberant family.

And the next 10 or 12 years go past in a sort of blissful montage. Children are born, grow up, fall in love. Alice has found a warm convivial home in a country that has everything she didn't get in Switzerland. What could possibly go wrong?

If you know anything about Middle East politics, you'll know the answer is likely to be sectarian civil war.

Neighbours fight neighbours, streets become war zones. Suddenly nowhere is safe, and the whole family starts moving into Alice and Joseph's city flat.

The writer-director of Skies of Lebanon is the Lebanese-French Chloe Mazlo - this is her first feature - but it's not her intention to deliver a blow-by-blow history lesson.

We're never even told who's fighting who in the war since most of the participants are mostly wearing masks.

But this film is about the people affected, and how, all too soon, many middle-class Lebanese start making plans to leave the one-time "Paris of the Middle East" for the real thing.

Alice is most adamantly against deserting what she's come to think of as her homeland. Are we cowards, she asks? We must stay.

Alice is based on director Chloe Mazlo's own grandmother, and the stories she told about arriving, then living in what she thought was paradise.

But paradise was never regained - despite so many false dawns over the past 40 years or so.

The only things that remain of Old Beirut are the memories of the people who'd been there.

The shots of the city in Skies of Lebanon are deliberately keyed in behind the action, and they look heartbreakingly glamorous.

Even if these days, they only exist in small parts of Paris - and of course in films like this.

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