http://www.shepherd-express.com/shep..._day/film.html


West Beirut - Directed by Quentin Tarantino's
cameraman...Ziad Doueiri

War is always **** but civil war can be especially hellish for the way it pits neighbor against neighbor. In the case of Lebanon's civil war during the 1970s and '80s, it was often neighborhood against neighborhood, as in the country's capital Beirut, whose Muslim West Side was at war with its Christian East Side. It was a civil war with many and complicated causes, and with plenty of foreigners pulling the strings of their local puppets, but the Muslim-vs.-Christian dimension became a shorthand description of the entire conflict.

Ziad Doueiri, a West Beirut boy as the shells began to fall, grew up to become Quentin Tarantino's cameraman. In his directoral debut West Beirut (Not Rated), Doueiri tells the experiences of a feckless adolescent whose first reaction to the civil war can roughly be translated as "Cool! School will be closed! Neat explosions, too!" The director's autobiographical stand-in, played by his own younger brother Rami Doueiri, is a lay-about and class clown who wants nothing from life but to smoke cigarettes with the guys, talk about girls, listen to bad American disco records and shoot movies on a Super 8 camera.

The bicycle-powered quest for Super 8 film in a society that had broken down so badly it can scarcely supply food (though bullets are plentiful) is one of West Beirut's plot devices. As fluent in American pop culture as in French (the language of the political and cultural elite to which his parents belong) and Arabic (the language of the street), young Doueiri is cast as a filmmaker in the making.

Working in post-civil war Beirut with a low budget and a mixture of amateur and professional actors, Doueiri's production often has the look of an elaborately staged home movie-the raw black-and-white Super 8 snippets a periodic reminder of the director's boyhood roots. Naturally, West Beirut is most successful at capturing life at home and in the neighborhood streets. The few battle scenes seem to have taxed Doueiri's budget; wisely, he often allows stock TV footage to represent the historical events that engulfed his country in madness.

West Beirut's goals are as modest as its means. It doesn't try to make sense of the civil war, although anecdotally it provides outsiders with many insights. It is nothing more than the story of one boy coming of age in a once-cosmopolitan city torn apart by the politics of hatred. An immature boy to be sure, but one in whom the spark of creativity burned.