In Mounia Akl’s ambitious debut feature, a family’s attempts to escape the filth of Beirut go awry when the garbage follows them to their doorstep.
As civic emergencies go, few possess the symbolic clarity of a garbage crisis. They’re ugly. They stink. They signify dysfunction, rot and toxicity in ways that need no sorting.
They are also an effective shortcut to dramatic poignancy, as the Lebanese director Mounia Akl demonstrates in her ambitious first feature, “Costa Brava, Lebanon.” But if it sounds like a facile metaphor, blame history: Beirut has been choking on garbage for years — including, but hardly limited to, the kind you put in bags.
Situated in a dystopian near future indistinguishable from the present, the film’s setting is less a space for imagination than for cynicism: The more things change, the more they stay the same. The trash is still a problem. The leaders are still corrupt.
Perhaps things could be different in the countryside, where one family struggles to maintain an off-grid Eden. Years before, Souraya (Nadine Labaki), a famous singer, escaped there to build a family with her husband, Walid (Saleh Bakri), a disillusioned and damaged former activist. But after a government land seizure brings the garbage literally to their door, the fragility of their little ecosystem becomes apparent.
Souraya wonders whether Beirut was really so bad. Their teenage daughter (Nadia Charbel) dreams of boys and a bigger world. Their other daughter (Ceana and Geana Restom) is too young to give up on her daddy, but she has also absorbed his trauma, harassed by the obsessive-compulsive delusion that by counting she can control the surrounding chaos.
The paradise these characters seek might as well be the Spanish coast of the title, elusive as it is. If a fuller sense of their humanity is sometimes lost to the ideas they serve, Akl has nonetheless produced a smart and sensitive film.
Costa Brava, Lebanon
Not rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
