A London-dwelling émigrée goes back to Lebanon to see her dying father in this somewhat overwrought film examining a difficult childhood
This somewhat overwrought drama was apparently shot during the Covid-19 pandemic, partly in the city of the title and partly on sets in a Bulgarian studio. Its higgledy-piggledy production schedule perhaps accounts for the film’s fractured, frenetic quality and the feeling that the characters are perpetually in motion. Mind you, to be fair, the shredded editing might also be meant to reflect the distraught mental state of protagonist Lana (Tala Calil, also co-writer and producer) and the energy of the city itself, a municipality ravaged by wars that also has some of the most chaotic traffic in the Middle East. There’s even a scene where Lana’s new friend Sirine (Flavia Bechara) is driving and wants to take her coat off so she makes Lana take the wheel, much to Lana’s terror and distress, a nonchalance about safety believable for a city where traffic lights appear to be only a suggestion.
That said, Lana has a lot going on so she’s easily rattled. She left Beirut 25 years earlier, and has only come back to see her biological father of whom she has only negative memories, from a childhood blighted by his alcoholism and violence. These days she lives in London with her boyfriend Ben (Michael E Rodgers) and her mother, but the former relationship is also rocky due to Lana’s OCD. She’s obsessed with wearing as much sanitary PPE kit as possible, including not just an N95 (in UK FFP2) mask but one of those full-face clear plastic ones, too. However, she suddenly finds the strength to stop wearing all the gear when she gets back to Beirut and reconnects with her cousin Rami (Assaad Bouab). She starts to open up a bit more, and befriends the aforementioned Sirine, who helps Lana when she’s having a panic attack at the hospital. By slow degrees she works up enough fortitude to face her father before he dies, but that means confronting some family secrets she never knew.
