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THE
KITE
4/10
Le
cerf-volant : Lebanon (Leb-Fr) 2003 : Randa Shalal
SABBAG : 80 mins
The plot
of The Kite could easily have taken place in the wake of any military
conflict all over the world, but it is actually based on happenings in
a small Syrian village up in the Golan Heights in the aftermath of the
1967 war with the Israelis. Land and villages are ravaged by military
abuse and all kinds of suppression. Families are divided, finding themselves
on different sides of an enforced border, closely guarded by military
forces. Only women to be married and dead people are allowed to cross
the border to be united with their loved ones…
(from official Tromsø 2004 Film Festival programme)
In Sunderland
– my home town, and the place where I currently (Feb 04) still reside
– a “kite” is working-class slang for a beer-belly. In the last twelve
months or so, I have seen not one but two films entitled The Kite,
and I am disappointed to say that neither of them concerns the pendulous
‘gut’ developed by ale-swillers. Making a movie about Sunderland beer-bellies
would intrigue this viewer, of course, but the resulting meisterwerk
would probably struggle to obtain a berth on the global film-festival
circuit. No such trouble for Aleksei Muradov or Randa Chahal Sabbag, whose
Kites – original titles Zmej
and Le Cerf-volant – have proved popular to festival programmers
despite their many deficiencies. Indeed, many festivals (such as Tromsø)
have programmed both features, and have needed to distinguish between
the pair by noting “Russia” or “Lebanon” alongside the titles in catalogues,
etc.
The two films
are quiet fables in which kites – as in those things kids fly in the sky
– represent the idea of freedom: originality is clearly not the strong
suit of either director. And neither, truth be told, is movie-making.
Their films are shown in festivals because of their issues they explore
(post-Soviet family misery for Muradov, Divine
Intervention–ish ironies of the Israel-Lebanon conflict for Sabbag)
rather than their instrinsic artistic merits.
The Lebanese
Kite is thankfully never quite so tedious as the Russian one –
it skims by at a brisk 80 minutes, and features a watchably luminous turn
from Flavia Bechara as the strong-willed Lebanese girl Lamia, who despite
her education is forced into an arranged marriage with a boy over in the
Israeli-annexed ‘sector’ of her village. Her heart belongs elsewhere,
of course – with Youssef (Maher Bsaibes), a border guard who, though Lebanese
himself, has been recruited into the Israeli security forces.
But while
Alain Levent’s cinematography does Bechara justice, she isn’t very well
some broad turns from the supporting players, nor by Ziad Rahbani’s incessant
old-school-muzak score. Even worse is Sabbag’s predictable script and
its hackneyed symbolism. As soon as we see Lamia in a wedding-dress walking
between militarised zones, for instance, it’s only a matter of seconds
before she snags it on a barbed-wire fence. Sabbag’s direction, meanwhile,
struggles to cope with the more ambitiously poetic passages of her script
– and she badly fumbles the shift into magical-realism at the finale,
in which dream, fantasy, premonition and reality messily and confusingly
collide.
3rd February,
2004
(seen 17th January : Fokus Cinema, Tromsø – Tromsø
International Film Festival)
click here
for a full list of reviewed films from the Tromsø International Film Festival
2004
by Neil
Young
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