SerpApi.Org
At the exact minute that baby Nino first came into this world, a rocket erupted through the walls of the Beirut hospital where his mother had just given birth - it was 5:05 p.m. Down the hall, just a few seconds later, a different woman gave birth to a little girl named Yasmina, whose cries could hardly be heard over the sound of the explosions around her. That happened at 5:06 p.m.
"A Sad and Beautiful World" is acutely specific about the time, but withholds any concrete information about the date; amid the half-century of intermittent violence that has plagued Lebanon since the start of its civil war in 1975, such incidents have become as cyclical and unspectacular as the seasons. What year is it when this decades-spanning love story begins? It doesn't matter, and writer/director Cyril Aris ("Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano") deliberately confuses the point.
Voiceover narration tells us that a massacre took place that day, and the last stretch of the country's railroad was destroyed. But it also tells us that "on that day we sent a rocket to space," a reference accompanied by local news footage of the Lebanese Rocket Society launching its first suborbital test flight in the early 1960s. In a place whose people are forced to endure the same struggles as their parents (to paraphrase one of this film's most aching laments), time will always be a flat circle. Joy will always be braided together with pain. Fireworks will always be mistaken for bombs. Home will always be a history to escape.
Per the contradiction of its title, "A Sad and Beautiful World" is constantly navigating between a love for Lebanon and the longing to leave it behind, a dialectic that Aris expresses by offsetting the gravity of his film's setting with the lightness of a pop romance. Imagine if "(500) Days of Summer" was projected onto the pain of life during wartime - or vice versa - and you'll have a rough idea of how this movie frames the star-crossed relationship between its fated lovers. They remain bound to each other even as their imagined paths to happiness seem to lead in opposite directions.
Nino (Hasan Akil), who survived unspeakable loss as a child, has grown into a charismatic restaurateur whose Italian-flavored cuisine brings the world to Lebanon on a plate. He would never entertain the idea of leaving. Despite a less tragic upbringing that saw her family spend time abroad, the vibrant but cynical Yasmina (Mounia Akl) has grown bitter toward her birthplace and toward life itself. She intends to move to Germany as soon as she finishes her consultant work for the country's 2025 energy campaign. "Boyfriend and girlfriend" when they were seven years old (a relationship status they agreed upon over juice boxes), Nino and Yasmina literally crash back into each other's lives when he accidentally drives his car through the wall of her parents' living room.
It's unclear if they remember each other, though Aris prefers to emphasize the extent to which they would even want to. For someone as nostalgic as Nino, this is the ultimate meet-cute (he seizes on the crash by inviting the girl's family to his restaurant for an intimate dinner). For Yasmina, who already has one foot in Europe, such a blast from the past feels like a strange cosmic snag.
But Anthony Sayhoun's plucky and shimmering score, which tempers "Amélie"-esque synth whimsy with more traditional Arabic sounds, makes it obvious enough that magic is afoot. Meanwhile, extended flashbacks to Nino and Yasmina's childhood romance tug at the present with a palpably Western sense of emotionality (Aris cut the film with "Moonlight" co-editor Nat Sanders, who still knows how to hopscotch through time to maximum effect). Flirtatious bickering soon gives way to step-printed desire, and even a "Friends"-coded race home from the airport, as the dust and exposed rebar of wartorn Beirut fades into a flushed smear of neon lights, fragrant kitchens, and crystal blue seas.
The threat is still there, suffused into the air like a memory, but for a time the choice between love and survival no longer feels mutually exclusive to Nino and Yasmina. Another child is born, and the cycle begins again. As the years speed forward, a new round of violence will force these characters into a final confrontation with the challenge of building a hopeless future together.
Unabashedly sentimental and committed to its heightened cuteness even as the earth threatens to rip apart below Nino and Yasmina's feet, "A Sad and Beautiful World" is at its best when Aris commits to the romanticism of its tone. Broad and dogmatic as its nonlinear approach can be - lyrical montages, styled to resemble home video footage, root Nino's twee nostalgia in such purely engineered feeling that Yasmina's natural cynicism can seem weirdly manufactured by comparison - the film maintains a sharp eye for the rhymes between past and present. The slackness of its final third, in which Nino and Yasmina are divided over where to raise their daughter, is redeemed by Aris' enduring attention to how "politics" continue to intrude upon the everyday.
Whether the film's characters are wandering through the bones of a house they haven't built yet or sitting on the floor of an ultra-modern new apartment that might as well be in Dubai, Lebanon remains a third party in their love story. It's a love story that could never have been conceived anywhere else, and may not survive without a change of scenery.
Haunted by her feelings of unworthiness, Yasmina is suspicious of Nino's rose-colored glasses, and insists that, like Lebanon itself, he lives for a version of her that no longer exists. Nino, meanwhile, clings to his grandfather's fairy-tale vision of the country as a mythical island, where there are no bullets, no wars, and everyone has electricity at night. On its own, that recurring motif - visually literalized as a digital blue idyll in the middle of the ocean - seems mawkish, naive, and unworthy of a film that is otherwise so attuned to the heartache of leaving one's homeland, and to the quotidian extremes of living in this one. Despite the prescriptive nature of its framing, however, "A Sad and Beautiful World" ultimately wrestles with a question that neither of its characters will ever have the luxury of answering for themselves: Is it easier to love without hope, or to hope without love? Nino and Yasmina have always been bound together by that uncertainty, and the open-ended final moments of this movie leave us desperate to believe that they always will be.
Grade: B-
Watermelon Pictures will release "A Sad and Beautiful World" in theaters on Friday, July 24.
