Destroyed cities are not anomaly in modern life. In Indiana, I've worked in depopulated Gary and my father worked in ever-shrinking Detroit. When I was in college, two planes attempted to destroy downtown New York. And when I taught in New Orleans, the levees buckled and destroyed the school in which I began teaching my first English course. "THAT A CITY could die; for a European, that is unthinkable," wrote BHL in American Vertigo. But in the excellent 1987 documentary, "Beirut: The Last Home Movie" we are able to watch a Fracophone-Lebanese family--the country's urban Christian elite--talk through their lives as gunfire snaps in the emptying city around them. Three sisters, one brother, and a mother are all that's left of the old money Bustros family of Lebanon. The memory of the family matriarch, Evelyn Bustros, acts like a re-emerging specter. A writer, painter, and social activist, Evelyn's portrait--with its unblinking coldness--stares out at the anxieties and crippling uncertainties of her successors. Will the family sell the estate? Will the family be run out of Lebanon?
Gaby is in her mid-thirties, a long-time New Yorker, wised-up but fragile and artistic. Mouna, the eldest, is a lonely and self-described "egocentric." She describes the end of her marriage (which occurred for no particular reason, save Mouna's coldness) and describes her love of "absolute" destruction. Meanwhile, mother, Nyla, a quiet younger sister, and the youngest brother, Fady, play much lesser roles.
The family talks and talks more, but nothing changes. What the film succeeds in creating is a two-hour long exploration--alluded to in one frame--of a family stuck in a web of their own making. The setting of this entrapment is a massive 18th century house, in some ways a psychic symbol in which all family-members live and squirm. If the outside war reunited the family, the psychological irresolution they endure keeps them there, reflecting and examining their relationships and past. The house, even when full of chain-smoking revelers, always seems empty. Within the home are azure chandeliers, photographs, and all the quiet tedium and protection one would need, say, if a civil war is unraveling your country.
There is no next in this movie, there is simply more. The flashes of Beirut's destruction appear as blips, minor transitions in the narrative. Could this film have been made elsewhere? Perhaps, with an uptown family in New Orleans as the floodwaters rose. There is then, an enduring truth of a detached elite, hidden in plain sight to an alien outside world. A chaotic world with its internal rivalries and international sharks waiting to hungrily snatch the Lebanon's left-overs seems as far-away as the subway Gaby took to JFK.
So what's at stake in this movie? The well-being and future of the Bustros dynasty? The future of Lebanon? It's Christian elite? While not a political movie, the Bustros' seem unaware of their own biases and social standing. Gaby's mother wants to entertain and please, yet her reason for being has evaporated since her husband death and the destruction of her city. What use is she in a world devoid of gossip, parties, and culture? Servants and landscapers quietly do the family's bidding and any talk of the ferocious politics of the outside world is met with quiet and anxiety. They are an entire family retreating into besieged self-reflection; an examination that is strange, arresting, and sad.
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