Reviewing the latest Lebanese film, Hani Mustafa traces a multinational history Somewhat ironically, Philippe Aractingi's Bosta (Bus) is being promoted as "the first 100-per-cent Lebanese film" at a time when, conceding the economic pressures involved in filmmaking, the cinematic world is happy to classify films by the nationality of the filmmaker, not the production company (the only exception being the US, where production houses are sufficiently powerful to stand behind their films from start to finish). In the history of Lebanese cinema, indeed, though the landmarks are few and far between, there is an impressive number of European co- productions revolving for the most part around the Civil War (1975-1990); thanks to these, names like Burhan Alwaiya, Maroun Baghdadi and Jean Chamoun have made the rounds of the international film scene, and their work has appeared on some of the world's most prestigious award lists, with Baghdadi's Kharij Al-Hayat (Outside Life), for example, receiving the 1991 Cannes jury award (Baghdadi was to die in an elevator accident two years later). Since the 1990s, Lebanese filmmakers have, using the same production formula, no longer centred on the war, using it rather as a backdrop, as in Danielle Erbid's Maarik Hobb (Battles of Love, winner of the 2004 Milano Film Festival's best film award), in which a Christian Lebanese family drama taking place against the backdrop of the war in 1983 takes centre stage, with the war itself appearing only in the soundtrack. More celebrated was Randa Chahal Sabbag's The Kite, which won the Venice Film Festival's grand jury award in 2003: the story of a 15-year-old Druze girl living in the last Lebanese village before the green line, prior to the withdrawal of the Israeli forces from southern Lebanon in 2000. For over 30 years now Lebanese filmmakers have sought to accommodate the civil war, the tensions that preceded it and its ongoing aftermath, making it near impossible to isolate the realistic content of any script from this one topic. In Bosta, the French-Lebanese Aractingi goes further than most in the drive to escape the war, offering a dabka -based musical in which every sector of Lebanese society has some part to play. Aside from the dabka, Aractingi offers yet another symbol of national unity: the bus, known in Lebanese Arabic as el-bosta -- the word became world-known following the incident that triggered the war in April 1975, when Phalangists stopped a bus bearing Palestinians in Ain Al-Rumanna and murdered everyone on board. The film too starts on board a bus, which is so old it has stopped on the way -- a motif that keeps recurring throughout; and the symbolism is even more evident when Rodney El-Haddad as the male lead Kamal Mafkous tells the bus driver that the vehicle should be repainted to erase the marks of the war and bury its memory for good. As well as repainting the bus, the characters have another -- harder -- mission: to bring the dabka troupe of the Aliya Comprehensive School back into existence. Kamal, the son of the manager and owner of the school, has returned following a 15-year absence during which he studied music and dance in France to rebuild the troupe; this return is an occasion for Aractingi, who also wrote the script, to present a whole host of representative characters with their own stories and intractable complexities. There is, for one, Kamal himself, who remains unable to deal with anything prior to the day he left the country when, as the film reveals only very gradually -- the information isn't conveyed until the very end -- he unwittingly handed his own father a package containing a bomb, which killed the father; soon afterwards the school closed down and he departed. The very process of rebuilding the troupe, eventually to be called DJ Dabka -- Kamal's drive to incorporate contemporary musical tendencies like techno into traditional dabka, for example -- is an attempt to realise the national objective of bringing all Lebanese together into the folds of a shared cultural heritage: in this case the renewal of old ideas which, though deeply valued in themselves, require urgent development. This idea receives a somewhat superficial treatment, lowering the quality of the film as a whole, especially in scenes -- like the one in which the troupe fails to participate in the Anjar dabka festival -- when the rhetoric of national unity comes to the surface. Following this failure, the troupe starts touring Lebanon, an occasion for further dramatic exploration, as in the tension between Kamal's first love Aliya (Nadine Labaki) and the TV anchor who accompanies the troupe, Isabel (Rana Alamuddin), not only further complicating Kamal's troubles but resulting in Aliya leaving the troupe in the end. It is on the power and spontaneity of the actors that Aractingi depends for releasing dramatic energy, as in the case of another failed relationship, between Tawfik (Mounir Malaeb) and Foula (Nada Abu Farhat), who could not resume their relationship in the past because they belonged to different sects -- a somewhat hackneyed theme not only in Lebanese but in Arab culture as a whole. Besides such love affairs, Aractingi briefly touches on a range of minor dramas, such as the patriarchal authority governing the life of Omar (Omar Rajeh) or the homosexuality of Khalil (Bishara Atallah), who is determined to replace Aliya when she leaves, announcing that he doesn't care what people say, and adding -- and in so doing revealing his sexual orientation for the only time through the duration of the film -- that it is time people found out the truth about him. But nothing is sufficiently developed. Indeed, even when it comes to Kamal himself, the film fails to delve deeply enough into the characters, presenting a somewhat partial and superficial view of their human and psychological dimensions. Kamal is not much deeper than any of the other characters; he just bears rather more, or more obvious anger regarding the death of his father. Nor is there any convincing reference to the effect of the war on the school or the troupe. Despite the impossible conditions of the war and its aftermath, Lebanese cinema has certainly managed to produce films of quality and depth, capable of competing at the international level. To argue about the nationality of these films based on the nationality of their producers seems a moot point.
