A city divided

Published 26 July 1999

Film byJonathan Romney

In some respects, Ziad Doueiri's first feature is the sort of male coming-of-age film that could have been made anywhere in the world. The adolescent hero hangs out with his best buddy, listens to 1970s soul, gets the hots for the new girl in his block and has the thrill of his life when he accidentally finds himself in the legendary local brothel. But we're more than one step away from Porky's territory here: Doueiri's spirited sentimental education is set in Beirut in 1975, at the start of the Lebanese civil war. West Beirut is a classic example of the "first film" genre, if there is such a thing - one of those stories in which film-makers reveal, expressly or incidentally, how they came to be film-makers. According to Doueiri, his film is 90 per cent autobiographical, and you wonder whether that's an underestimate: his protagonist's surname is Noueiri and he is played by the director's own younger brother.

The film begins in April 1975, as two Muslim boys, Tarek (Rami Doueiri) and his best friend Omar (Mohamad Chamas), stand in the playground of Beirut's French high school and point their Super-8 camera at the fighter planes above. By the next morning, the city has been divided into Christian and Muslim zones, with militia patrolling every corner. For the boys it's all a lark, and life goes on - there are comic neighbours to be spied on, classmates to be taunted and Omar's glamorous young aunt to be ogled. It's teenage lust that provides their initiation into the new hell they live in: they are trying to get their film of the aunt's cleavage developed when they encounter their first menacing patrol.

Doueiri, who has lived in the States since 1983, put in several years working on Quentin Tarantino's crews before making his first feature. But if the visual confidence and pacing suggest an American education, there's also a strong French influence (the film is in fact a French co-production), as befits a film that addresses the aftermath of French colonialism. In the opening school scenes, Tarek cheerfully sabotages the "Marseillaise", then twits his French teacher, who could have walked straight out of Truffaut's Les Quatre Cent Coups; she responds with a stiff lecture about how Lebanon owes everything to France. As if on cue, the first gunshots are heard. French colonialist pride is later lampooned in the form of a crowing rooster. Tarek grumbles about having to learn his Corneille, but Doueiri airs his French influences with pride: there's a strong hint of Vigo's Zero de Conduite in Tarek's opening salvo on school decorum, while the Truffaut echoes extend to a bike ride a trois that's pure Jules et Jim.

Doueiri's film is acute in its observations of the way that people, especially the young, resist changes imposed by history and imperviously go on pursuing their usual occupations. For Tarek and Omar, the collapse of the recognised order is a liberating rush that allows them to devote further energies to their prime obsessions. Their lives are ruled by American disaster movies, girls and an adolescent homoeroticism that Doueiri handles beautifully.

In one scene, Omar winds Tarek up with a hot story about his aunt: the powerful frisson between the boys vanishes only when Omar deflates the tension right at the last minute. It's awkward that the third corner of the triangle - the Christian girl called May (Rola Al Amin), whose crucifix pendant proves a liability in the Muslim side of town - has little to do. But then, that rather fits with the way the boys sideline her as they cultivate their burgeoning machismo: Tarek, out with May for the first time, insists on greeting every local character they pass, like a Scorsese wiseguy glad-handing the neighbourhood.

The sense of collapse, when it finally dawns on them, is heralded by ominous domestic signs: suddenly Omar's father insists that his easy-going Muslim family start reading the Koran and even condemns rock'n'roll as evil ("Is Paul Anka the work of Satan?" the boys worry). Tarek's intellectual liberal parents are left stranded and confused and helpless: tenderly played by Carmen Lebbos and Joseph Bou Nassar, they get more space for intimacy than parents are usually allotted in such memoirs, and Doueiri is careful not to over-milk the irony of the father's insistence that everything will soon return to normal. Where other directors would make these scenes pay off with a tragic shock, Doueiri orchestrates the film's emotional climax around a subtle and understated coup de cinema at the very end.

Rami Doueiri as Tarek is a natural, swaggering along in his flares or launching into barrages of sly face-pulling; he must have cheeked his director brother something rotten throughout the shoot. Mohamad Chamas as his mouthy, diminutive sidekick is even better, an abrasive Joe Pesci to Tarek's De Niro. They're a terrific double act, especially considering how tough it must be for teenage actors to cast the machismo aside and suggest a vulnerable, equivocal intimacy.

More memoir than history lesson, the film doesn't spell out a great deal about the forces that transform Beirut, but it gives you a strong sense of the city (or, at least, half of it) as a lived-in place. Mixing its intimate good humour with something of the urgency of Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, West Beirut conveys the feel of life as usual in a war zone.

"West Beirut" (15) plays at the ICA, The Mall, London SW1, the Sheffield Showroom and the Dublin IFC, and from 6 August at the Edinburgh Film House and the Bristol Watershed

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