Photo: Marianne Feghali as Lina in Danielle Arbid's In the Battlefields
Danielle Arbid's In the Battlefields takes place in Lebanon in the early '80s. A civil war is being waged on the streets, but it's the domestic conflict inside a middle-class Beirut apartment building that's most terrorizing. The director summons a stirring social and sexual awakening in the patient expression of 12-year-old Lina (Marianne Feghali), who spends much of the film watching her family self-destruct: her vicious aunt Yvonne mistreats her maid while her father—having incurred a fortune in gambling debts—is hounded by local thugs. What with the suffocating morass of frustration and rage that consumes these emotional cripples, the film is in many ways the philosophical kin of Lucretia Martel's La Cienaga. Arbid has an Antonioniesque talent for contrast, pitting interior and exterior spaces against each other to call attention to a political and social communion between the two realms. Ed Gonzalez
Danielle Arbid's In the Battlefields takes place in Lebanon in the early '80s. A civil war is being waged on the streets, but it's the domestic conflict inside a middle-class Beirut apartment building that's most terrorizing. The director summons a stirring social and sexual awakening in the patient expression of 12-year-old Lina (Marianne Feghali), who spends much of the film watching her family self-destruct: her vicious aunt Yvonne mistreats her maid while her father—having incurred a fortune in gambling debts—is hounded by local thugs. What with the suffocating morass of frustration and rage that consumes these emotional cripples, the film is in many ways the philosophical kin of Lucretia Martel's La Cienaga. Arbid has an Antonioniesque talent for contrast, pitting interior and exterior spaces against each other to call attention to a political and social communion between the two realms. Ed Gonzalez
