Hiam Abbass Leads May-December Romance

For her latest drama Only Rebels Win, Lebanese-French writer-director Danielle Arbid (Simple Passion, Parisienne, A Lost Man) dusts off an old filmmaking technique, rear projection, in order to get around the fact that she couldn’t shoot in Beirut due to constant Israeli bombardment at the time of production. The workaround adds a subtle but striking artificiality to the proceedings, making this otherwise somewhat conventional story — about a 27-year-old South Sudanese-Chadian immigrant (Amine Benrachid) and a 63-year-old Palestinian woman (Hiam Abbass, best known Stateside for Succession but a near-ubiquitous presence in Middle Eastern cinema) falling in love — feel more experimental and edgier than it might have otherwise.

Programmed to open Berlin’s Panorama section, this soft homage to local German hero Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, itself a homage to Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows, offers a workable blend of new and old, contemporary geopolitics and local socioeconomic tensions rubbing up against primordial, universal passions and follies. The mélange should play well for festival audiences but will have very modest theatrical prospects.

For all its virtues, there’s something a little undercooked about Arbid’s screenplay, which doesn’t endow Benrachid’s strapping but enigmatic love interest Ousmane with anything like the dimensionality of Abbass’ heroine Suzanne. Indeed, most of the Lebanese characters here are more finely grained, even the minor ones who are meant to be bigoted straw men brought on to contrast with Suzanne’s natural generosity of spirit. Meanwhile, some of the more significant supporting players, such as Shaden Fakih as Suzanne’s permanently disgruntled daughter Sana and Alexandre Paulikevitch as complicated queer sex worker Layal, enrich the sense of texture with richly conceived characters that also upstage the less defined Ousmane.

It all starts when Suzanne sees Ousmane being beaten up in the streets by men, he later tells her, who refused to pay him wages he was owed for manual labor or give him back his confiscated passport. A widow who lives alone in a spacious Beirut apartment block, Suzanne brings Ousmane back to her place to treat his wounds, and the two get to talking. She opens up about how she didn’t much love her late husband; he shares some details about his arduous journey from South Sudan.

There’s clearly a spark there, and before long they’re dancing together, waving their arms about like a couple of 1960s hippies at a happening in the living room to a classic panty-loosener, Julio Iglesias’ ballad “Un jour tu ris, un jour tu pleures (No Soy De Aqui).” The transition to lovers is effortless.

Given that Suzanne is embodied by Abbass, one of the most elegant actors of her generation and still a looker in her mid-60s, it’s entirely plausible that Ousmane is sincere when he praises her beauty. What a shame that Arbid undermines that by the last reels as Ousmane undergoes a substantial change in disposition, taking up drink — despite having first presented himself as a good abstemious Muslim — and generally turning to crime and licentious behavior. Presumably we are to infer that the stress of the societal disapproval he and Suzanne face as a couple once their relationship becomes known is to blame for his moral decay, but the motivations remain murky.

The script is better on the bitchy, suffocating but often amusing world of neighborhood gossip as Suzanne gingerly makes her way around the racism of her friends and neighbors. Her two colleagues at the fabric store where she works, Lamia (Cynthia El Khazen) and Arsinee (Paula Sehnaoui), snipe and bitch about everyone like a couple of fishwives, so you can imagine the opprobrium that comes out when they learn Suzanne is seeing an African man.

Arbid is persuasive about the casual racism and snobbery that’s marbled through Beirut culture for all its seeming sophistication, with Lebanese Arabs looking down on Palestinian immigrants, and most everyone prejudiced against darker-skinned newcomers. Sana, her brutish husband Toni (Ziad Jallad) and son Simon (Samir Hassoun) are just as bad. There’s a little oasis of tolerance at the local café run by Akram (George Sawaya), but even there snakes lurk in the tall grass. And the local priest, seemingly unfazed when Suzanne tells him she would like him to marry her to Ousmane, declines to help.

The footage of Beirut streets, homes and cafes, shot specifically for this film, adds a distinct sense of place even as the obviousness of the rear projection creates a mood of heightened theatricality. The whole device makes this feel like a fable or passion play, a story as old as ancient tragedy and yet ineluctably contemporary.