Mention films about refugees in Lebanon, and the mind inevitably conjures up images of gritty drama oozing devastation, doom and disorder. But that’s not what drives Dirty, Difficult, Dangerous. Revolving around a pair of star-crossed, cast-out lovers in Beirut who travel to the Lebanese-Syrian borderlands, Wissam Charaf’s second feature subverts expectations with its reliance on static shots, tableau-like mise-en-scene and deadpan comedy, with all this unfolding in old-school Academy ratio.
Despite spending the past two decades covering war zones for French TV channels, the Paris-based Charaf avoids realism and instead evokes Aki Kaurismäki – an approach he already hinted at in Heaven Sent (Tombé du ciel), his first fiction feature that bowed in Cannes in 2016. While that film didn’t travel widely after its premiere on the Croisette, Dirty, Difficult, Dangerous will: its style stands out from similarly-themed films on the festival circuit, and this French-Italian-Lebanese co-production should interest festival programmers after its premiere at the Giornate degli Autori sidebar in Venice.
As if the title isn’t a curveball enough, Dirty, Difficult, Dangerous disorients the viewer from the get-go with an opening scene in which a group of Ethiopian women conducts a joyous religious ritual while dressed in traditional attire. Perhaps Charaf wants to establish, right from the start, that he doesn’t dwell on merely misery; however much they struggle for survival, his protagonists also crave for experiences which allow them to transcend their everyday circumstances.
And that’s how Mehdia (French model-turned-actor Clara Couturet, making her feature film debut) is introduced on screen. Just moments after being seen singing spiritual songs with her compatriots, she exchanges a quick, secret kiss with her lover Ahmed (Ziad Jallad) as both take a breather from their tedious jobs — she’s a migrant maid in a stifling middle-class household in downtown Beirut, he’s a Syrian refugee buying and reselling scrap metal on those same urban streets. Later in the film, the couple will also be seen enjoying some post-coital bliss in the roofless hulk of the abandoned house that Ahmed calls home – a beautifully rendered image of a romance in ruins, lit and framed like a Manet painting. In between these moments of joy, however, the couple has to navigate threats and dangers in their daily lives.
For Mehdia, it’s the demands of her seemingly benign pension-aged employers. Ibrahim (Rifaat Tarabey) is a senile old man during the day and a sleepwalking menace at night, as he regularly gets out of bed and tries to strangle the girl when his violent, racist id, and maybe that of Lebanese society, reveals itself when no one’s looking. His wife Leila (Darina Al Joundi) stops him every time, but she cares more about what neighbours might think than Mehdia’s well-being. The morning after, Leila chastises Mehdia for not regulating Ibrahim’s daytime TV intake, insisting the maid should stop the master from watching the news and switch to wildlife programmes instead. But that’s a gesture smacking of ignorance and cynicism too: isn’t all that footage of preying beasts filled with as much primal violence as an average news bulletin?
Meanwhile, Ahmed is putting up with more visible perils. Walking along streets adorned with banners warning of nightly curfews for Syrian refugees, he’s constantly battling racism of various kinds, ranging from being turned away at job centres, to fending off local mobs looking for a Syrian guy to lynch. What’s eating him up most – literally – is the way he seems to be turning metallic. As the survivor of a bomb attack back home, he scratches and disgorges shards from under the skin – a condition which will become worse as the film unfolds, an extremely visceral manifestation of war trauma on the human body and soul. (In his production notes, Charaf said this was drawn from his real-life experience of being maimed by an Israeli grenade when he was a child, and having to contend with the shrapnel still submerged inside him.)
With a screenplay co-written with Mariette Désert (who also contributed to Heaven Sent, and is one of the co-writers of the recent festival hit The Passengers of the Night) and visual artist Hala Dabaji, Charaf refrains from portraying Lebanon’s political schisms, social chaos or strained personal relationships to make his point about the disintegration of his country. It’s not as if he’s avoiding reality: when Mehdia and Ahmed finally flee Beirut, we see refugee camps and exiled inhabitants, hospitals with maimed patients, and construction sites where men work for a pittance. But the more incisive moments are droll scenes of a gaudy “concert” to cheer up refugee kids, or the mistranslation and misplaced sympathy in a TV interview Mehdia gives to a European war correspondent (which might be Charaf’s mild, self-deprecating dig at his other job as a journalist).
Augmented by Martin Rit’s solid, thoughtfully-lit camerawork and Tom Mattei’s production design, Charaf has delivered a piece in which he engages with circumstances in a visual approach that challenges the viewers’ minds rather than tears at their hearts. Beirut hasn’t appeared so uncluttered on film for quite a while, but it’s also evident that Charaf’s depiction of order is merely a barbed comment of the decay of the Lebanese nation (and the national psyche) within. In this powerful artistic statement, Charaf points out how all this suppressed fury is where the danger lies at such difficult times.
Director: Wissam Charaf
Screenwriters: Wissam Charaf, Mariette Désert, Hala Dabaji
Cast: Clara Couturet, Ziad Jallad, Rifaat Tarabey, Darina Al Joundi
Producers: Charlotte Vincent, Katia Khazak with Marco Valerio Fusco, Micaela Fusco, Pierre Sarraf
Executive producers: Nadim Cheikrouha, Saïd Hamich Benlarbi
Director of photography: Martin Rit
Editor: Clémence Diard
Art director: Tom Mattei
Music composer: Zeid Hamdan
Sound designer: Pierre Bompy
Production companies: Aurora Films, with Intramovies, Né à Beyrouth
World sales: Intramovies
Venue: Giornate degli autori, Venice Film Festival
In Arabic, Amharic, Bengali, English
83 minutes
