Customer Reviews

Beirut: The Last Home Movie

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I saw a noble family trying to lead a normal life by renewing their house (that currently hosts a Ministry), getting married, talking about their infancy at the sound of bomb strikes as if nothing were happening around them - even though at the end we see the main heroin breaking down omitting she can't take it anymore.

However, I should make a big effort watching it again since it was too slow to attend and I had to struggle trying to understand their sayings, half french - half english at the sound of bombs.

In no way do I try to reduce the value of such a documentary...however I would recommend it only to the ones who would be interested in observing what I was, therefore the life of a lebanese family (even though we cannot say the Bustros family was a middle-class one) during the savage civil war. And this is actually what I got...

I found this video dreadfully boring and the only people I can see enjoying it are those that are interested specifically in the Bustros family. I bought the video in order to get a better insight into what it must have been like to live in Beirut during the Civil War, but the majority of the content focuses on the family members, their childhood, their thoughts, etc, and this elite bourgeois family by far did not experience the war like the majority of the population must have. The film did, however, contain some fascinating video footage and amazing audio of distant gunfire and shelling, but only in limited short clips in between boring interviews.

When I watched the DVD for the first time, I really couldn't make much of it: The sound quality is really terrible and I understood only half, it is very long (2 hours 10 minutes), and the way it is cut is confusing. The first cut was only 45 minutes I think, this is a later version.
However, when I watched it again, I became increasingly fascinated by the characters, the opulent 1851 house, the situation they lived in, and the way the director made the film. It helps that there is a long supplemental interview with Jennifer Fox (the director who was 21 when she made the film), which is also extremely interesting for anyone interested in the topic of documentary film making.
Ultimately the film is about the complex psychological make-up of the family in their fading glory over several generations, and about them being stuck in the past and prisoners in their mansion due to the war. Gaby tried to break out, but failed. Mouna, who was killed by a shell some time after the making of the movie in her bedroom, is particularly unusual. She claims how she loves destruction because it is so "absolute". Other characters highlight the struggle to cope with the challenges of being thrown into a particular existence with its privileges and limitations.
Death and destruction are shown outside the house in the form of burning buildings, at one time a rotting corpse, and constant shelling, sometimes the house and garden are hit, too. But the film is not about the politics of the civil war, and the family had insisted that they are portrayed as apolitical, for their own safety. That makes them appear more decadent, idle and isolated than they actually were.
A great film, but not an easy one.

If you HAVE to get this movie, the best way to view it is in Fast Forward. My father and I forced ourselves through about an hour's worth & really just wanted to gauge our eyes out. Documentary of a ridiculous, wealthy Lebanese family who have no sense of proportion and reality.

I would not have given it any stars, if I were allowed.