Mounia Akl’s feature debut, “Costa Brava, Lebanon” comfortably occupies a space between “Beasts of the Southern Wild” from “Honeyland”: Each movie deals with environmental dilemmas, ranging from climate change to the loss of biodiversity, but in their own ways and their own approaches. “Honeyland” takes the narrative nonfiction tack, chronicling the travails of a Macedonian beekeeper; “Beasts of the Southern Wild” grieves Hurricane Katrina’s aftermath with magical realism. In “Costa Brava, Lebanon,” Akl splits the difference. Her film is partly magical, partly real, but total fiction, because fiction is the best way to capture the tragicomic clown show that unfolds throughout.
The Badri family — father Walid (Saleh Bakri), mother Soraya (Nadine Labaki), grandma Zeina (Liliane Chacar Khoury), and daughters Tala (Nadia Charbel) and Rim (twins Ceana and Geana Restom) — live in a highland idyll, raising chickens, growing veggies, and sadly overlooking Beirut as the city putrefies under the amoral governance of its stumblebum president. Once upon a time, Walid and Soraya lived there themselves, but they got the hell out 8 years prior to the film’s events, Tala in tow, Rim on the way, and calamity at their doorstep; the farmhouse belongs to Walid’s sister, Alia (Yumna Marwan), enjoying a sophisticate’s life abroad in Colombia. But there’s a problem. The Beirut authorities have expropriated the land, and they’ve got it in their heads to turn the surrounding hills into a landfill.
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Tarek (François Nour) assures Walid of the project’s greenness, but Walid knows not to trust the young man’s word; a corrupt government can only send corrupt messengers. Before long the Badris’ backyard is made into a literal trash heap. The slimy, moldering refuse encroaches day by day on the trees lining the ridge like a doomed phalanx staring down an enemy they can’t withstand. Akl shows viewers the devastation through each of her protagonists’ eyes one at a time, cycling through their perspectives like she’s turning pages in a book. “Costa Brava, Lebanon” possesses a literary quality, but never at the expense of cinema: Akl’s direction lets the story read easily and cleanly, without making the implicit explicit or insulting the audience. Her film has levels.
“Costa Brava, Lebanon” benefits from accessibility, the best effect of Akl’s plainspoken style. She doesn’t restrict whimsy and enchantment to the children’s point of view; their parents are grown, but they haven’t forgotten what it is to be young, either. Soraya does a pencil dive into the family’s pool fully clothed, splashing with Tala and Rim without a care in the world; Walid wields farming implements as props and stages a gladiatorial battle with his daughters to a soundtrack of giggles and delighted shrieks. Mom and Dad used to protest in Beirut’s streets. They used to fight the power. They had dreams and hopes, and though life, a wicked masquerade of disappointment and pain, dashed most of them, they still got Tala, Rim, the house, and each other. That’s not half bad.
But the other half isn’t good, because there’s nothing like a cacophonous government intrusion on your privacy and personal space to send a whole family into a downward spiral. Garbage in, garbage out; cinematographer Joe Saade’s camera wistfully pans from construction vehicles — dump trucks, front loaders, excavators — wreaking havoc on the land to the land that’s yet unspoiled. Filmmaking is about inevitability. One day, all that the Badris survey will be a wasteland teeming with junk. What dreams did come true for Soraya and Walid are tread on and run over by Tarek and the president’s phony-baloney PR stunt. The work threatens their residence and their lives, too, because blowing a crater in the ground without giving ample warning is a recipe for a near miss.
Akl carefully documents how each member of the family interprets disaster differently. Rim looks at the heavy machinery as if she’s seeing monsters prowling around the edges of her turf; Tala experiences a key moment in coming of age — sexual awakening — when she starts crushing on Tarek. Soraya grows nostalgic for her past as a working musician; Walid goes half-mad maneuvering the legal system to shut down construction. He starts using seagulls as target practice, too. Zeina, the most down-to-earth Badri, embraces her mortality and starts smoking like a chimney in between drags off her oxygen tank. She’s a hoot. Akl isn’t a humorless sort and finds laughs wherever she can. For a movie about government incompetence married to government malfeasance, “Costa Brava, Lebanon” is surprisingly funny.
It’s clear-eyed, too, and above all sincere, which keeps its tender, vulnerable beats from getting anywhere near cornball territory. “It takes time to solve adults’ problems,” Walid says to Rim in a warmer exchange in the film’s third act. Their bond is made of cement; she’s her father’s daughter, spirited and stubborn, so Walid is unruffled by her response. “Then, why didn’t you start solving them earlier?” Here in the United States, thousands of miles, a sea, and an ocean away from Lebanon, your coast is either underwater or on fire. Climate change is a tangible danger, and our biggest, oldest cities aren’t prepared to resist it. But “Costa Brava, Lebanon” doesn’t preach about global crises. The characters simply talk about it instead, as most of us who are rightly worried about governments’ ineptitude in handling it often do.
Rim and Walid aren’t strictly referring to the garbage. They’re referring to everything. The world, not just the one their home’s foundation rests on but the one they’ve built in the mountains together, the interior world we all share with our own families, teeters on the brink of catastrophe. Soraya wants to return to Beirut. Walid wants to stay. The kids have to pick a side. As the parents are concerned for the children, so too are the children concerned for the parents. “Costa Brava, Lebanon” puts its characters on equal footing, and then keeps them grounded even in the film’s most dreamlike moments. That’s a feat worth celebrating as much as this is a film worth savoring. [A]
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