Under The Bombs

Rating:	★★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Drama

I had expectations of this multiple award-winning film and wasn't disappointed. I don't watch that many films and write even less reviews, but when I do it's a special one. Non-anglosphere cinema is reknowned for not being as dumbed-down as Hollywood, I'm thinking of French mainly, and just about anything with subtitles [from Blockbuster] is worth at least reading the synopsis on the back. Thus, this caught my eye. Having seen so much news on Gaza recently, it was probably the bombed building on the cover that struck a chord of familarity.

An 'Artificial Eye' film by Phillipe Aractingi, starring nobody I'd heard of and shot in Arabic with English subtitles, it is set during the 2006 Israeli-Lebanese conflict. Nada Abou-Farhat plays Zeina, a mother who has travelled from Dubai to Lebanon to find her six-year-old son Karim, incognito and feared dead under rubble.

It's a road movie, with only two central characters, Zeina and the taxi driver who she persuades to take her to the south, 'under the bombs' (though there is a ceasefire, there is a tension throughout that the rain could start again at any moment). The cinematography, shot almost as if it were a documentary, jerky and of varying picture quality, adds to this.

Tony the cabbie is an opportunist and not someone you trust at first, but the emotional content of this superb drama, for him, concerns his being opened up by his beautiful passenger. Initially he's just after money, and maybe getting to sleep with her if he can, but you see his character grow. Or rather, what was buried inside him, comes to the surface. Zeina, we see as a bit cold and ungrateful to him for doing what none of the other cabbies would do, but their warming to each other is one of the central threads in the narrative. Her character isn't as complex, I felt, but conveys the pain of loss and the stress felt by those under attack. The children they meet along the way are remarkably mature and war-hardened, the viewer being reminded of how every few years, the bombs fall again and this is everday life for these kids who have never known any different.

You can imagine what effect it has on a 'road-movie' when the vehicle encounters an enormous crater in the road? Their journey is full of detours which show us both the beauty of Lebanon and the kindness of a people pulled closer together by a common outside enemy. There is some pointing out how the Israelis bomb tactically - a petrol station is hit just because it is 'the most beautiful' one, for example. Those of us following the same nation's recent bombing of schools and hospitals in Gaza this year may be familiar. It's a Lebanese film and far from unbiased, but in general it is anti-war, showing Hezbollah as a violent negative force also. It's a love story; a mother's love for her son, a bubbling potential romance between the central characters, and a people's love for their war-torn country.

Subtitles might put off some people, but if you're one of them, you're missing out on some great films. I was a bit put off by Tony's striking resemblance to one of my friends, Mario... but fortunately he's a bit of an opportunist with a heart too, so that soon faded.

Only a film of course, but it shows close up, as best a film can, what it looks and feels like to be 'under the bombs'. I highly recommend it. The more sensitive you are to sad 'movies', or the subject matter, be warned... it will provoke an emotional response. That, I think, is the measure of a story well told.