A couple of years ago, in a newspaper interview, a man was trying to excuse the behaviour of his wife, who had been convicted of murder. It wasn't her fault, he said, she'd had a terrible upbringing: her father abused her, her mother beat her. "I'd rather grow up in Beirut than have the childhood she had," he said.
Beirut occupies that kind of place in people's psyches. The city is a byword for devastation: when there's a gas explosion, motorway pile-up or general urban mayhem, the scene is often likened to Beirut. For a war which ended eight years ago and was a complicated combustion of left and right, Muslim and Christian, Arab and Phoenician, Israeli and Palestinian, Syrian and Iranian, what happened in Lebanon has retained a curiously lasting place in the popular imagination.
So the lack of films and literature about the war is rather a surprise. Most of the western hostages and a few Lebanese wrote memoirs, and there have been a handful of novels, such as Hanan al-Shaykh's excellent Beirut Blues. But that's it. While the Bosnian war has already had its big-name movie, Welcome to Sarajevo, and some impressive smaller films, the war in Lebanon has held little interest for film-makers. All of which makes the release of Ziad Doueiri's debut film, West Beirut, an exciting prospect. It is the first film in Arabic to be released worldwide, and the biggest Arab film ever; it is already such a success in Lebanon that one excitable commentator said it had been seen by "most, if not all, of Beirut's population".
But West Beirut is not really a war film; instead it's a story of two teenage boys, Tariq and Omar, growing up to the backdrop of war. They live in Muslim west Beirut, but their school is in the Christian east so, at first, war just means an escape from lessons. Civil strife might be devastating your city, but if you're 14 and it's 1975, you still want to wear flares, make friends with a (Christian) girl, and find out about sex. Only later do the boys come to see what war really means; then they start to long for school and its certainties, for an innocence lost too soon.
Doueiri himself was 12 when the war started in 1975, and grew up in the Mazraa district of west Beirut. He left Lebanon in 1983 to go to film school in California (he claims to have been "more exposed to weapons in peacetime LA than in wartime Beirut") and has since worked behind the camera with the likes of Quentin Tarantino (on Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs) and Robert Rodriguez (on From Dusk till Dawn). Tarantino is an obvious influence on West Beirut: the fast-moving camera work, the 70s soundtrack, the macho posturing, the set pieces. The score was written by an American - former Police drummer, Stewart Copeland, who himself lived in Beirut for 10 years after his father opened the first CIA bureau there in 1953. The fusion of this hip, western style of film-making with a subject so far from the west coast - and in Arabic, to boot - is at the heart of the film's popularity.
It is something of an achievement that the film has been popular with Christians and Muslims in Lebanon. Many of the adults are played by Christians, and many of the teenagers by Muslims. (Tariq is played by Doueiri's brother, and the extraordinary Omar by an orphan and former thief called Mohammed Chamas, who, despite being something of a star in Beirut, is now living in a refugee camp as there is no real acting industry for him to join.) The message of the film, if it has one, is one of non-confessional plurality. A baker says to Tariq, "If anyone asks you your religion, say you're Lebanese and send them to me", while Omar wears two necklaces intertwined, one with a cross, the other with a miniature Koran - "now I can go wherever I want" he says. "I looked for the best people to play the parts," says Doueiri, "but, as many of the actors turned out to be Christian, I thought that would work to my advantage, because they can't accuse me of being anti-Christian. Most of the crew were Christian, too, and we filmed in east Beirut. There was a friendly tension between us all - it was, like, for 15 years we did not know each other, I couldn't even go to east Beirut, but now the war is over, let's get to know each other. We were teasing each other all the time."
But Doueiri admits relations between Christian and Muslim in Lebanon are not always so idyllic. "There will always be an ambiguous, love-hate relationship between us," he says. "When I went back [in 1996, for the first time in 13 years] I was attracted to the other side, even though I think they are the guilty ones. And they feel the same towards us."
I saw West Beirut at a London screening held by the Lebanese Graduates of Britain, and the guest list gives some idea of the importance of this film to the Arab world: the Lebanese, Egyptian and Syrian ambassadors and the Palestinian representative all turned up and the event was a sell-out, packed overwhelmingly with Lebanese (Christian and Muslim) but also Palestinians, Iraqis, Egyptians and Syrians. The audience reaction to aspects of the film are revealing. For example, there was cheering when Tariq defiantly sang the Lebanese anthem over the top of the Marseillaise (the coloniser's anthem); murmurs of excitement when the camera lingered, lovingly, on a falafel; and a round of applause for that cross and Koran intertwined.
But what was most intriguing was the laughter. The audience was thrilled by the baroque Arabic swearing - something usually censored from Arab films - and by the soap opera slapstick of an obese woman who shouts at all her neighbours. But often the audience was laughing at incidents I found terrifying. There is a superb scene when a crowd is marching in honour of the assassinated left-wing Druze leader, Kamal Jumblatt; Tariq and Omar join in with enthusiasm, only later confessing they have no idea who this "Kamal" is. Suddenly, militia appear and start firing on the crowd; Tariq and Omar are separated, Tariq hides in a car which then starts to move, and it is, perhaps, the first time in the war they are afraid. But while I found this scene frightening, most of the Lebanese audience was laughing uproariously.
What does Doueiri think of this? "I think that we Lebanese have a tendency to be frivolous, to be shallow, and therefore less scared,'" he claims. "This has been both an advantage and a disadvantage for us. It's bad because you don't learn very much, you don't take things seriously so you have a tendency to repeat the same errors. But it is good because it's not so traumatic. You traumatise less." Perhaps the Lebanese are in denial about their experiences because they were so horrific? "I think you're right, there is a sad denial," he says. "It has not allowed us to heal well."
West Beirut is a rather jolly, entertaining film, at least on the surface, but the most powerful moments are those Doueiri is not afraid to confront seriously. The famous incident when a busful of Palestinians was murdered by the Christian Phalange - the event held to have started the war on April 13, 1975 - is filmed with extraordinary power. The Arab world's biggest superstar, the legendary (and Lebanese) Fairouz, sings as the Palestinians are pulled off the bus and shot, one by one. (There were tears in the cinema at this.) The film ends with a sense of terrible, shaking pain - a startling, powerful way to end such a humorous film, and one which, says Doueiri, many Lebanese found difficult to deal with.
D oueiri's political background is very much of its era; his parents were members of the Mourabitoun, a Nasserite left-wing organisation, and he helped his mother run a secret radio station in a basement underneath a mosque. Unusually, he lost only one member of his family in all the 15 years of fighting: his cousin, Mustafa, who was killed in the 1975 Hotel Wars while fighting for the Mourabitoun. ("After he was killed, his brigade went up and caught the four Christian right-wingers and told them, you either get shot or you jump. They were on the top of the Holiday Inn at the time," says Doueiri.)
Doueiri forsakes historical accuracy for drama on a number of occasions. For example, Jumblatt was not murdered until 1977 and the idea that one could easily cross from west to east Beirut is misleading. Also, towards the end of the film Omar complains that his mother has started to wear the veil and his father to insist they pray to Allah. This is pretty impossible, as Islamic fundamentalism did not exist before Khomeini's 1979 revolution in Iran. Doueiri says: "I put the historical inaccuracy in to point the finger a little at Islamic fundamentalism, to make a criticism." Surely it was unnecessary to make such misleading changes? "I don't have a problem with them, they were for dramatic purposes," he says. But these inaccuracies are surely troubling when there are so few documents about the war that get the sort of distribution this film has.
But then, when do you make a film about a war? Doueiri spent years trying to raise the $800,000 he needed. "When I started looking for the money, in 1994, all the attention was shifting to the Bosnian war. Sarajevo was the new Beirut. All the Lebanese I approached said it was too early to make a film about the war, and all the Americans and Europeans said it was too late." In the end, French backers stumped up the cash, and helped the Lebanese find the hip, westernised director they'd been looking for: Ziad Doueiri, the Arab Tarantino.
