Shadows of Beirut

Writer: Tina Gharavi and Tara Calil

Director: Tina Gharavi

Shadows of Beirut is a drama set in London and Lebanon, written by Tara Calil and Tina Gharavi. Calil stars as British Lebanese Lana, and Iranian-born British Gharavi directs. The story draws on Calil’s lived experience of obsessive-compulsive disorder, trauma and displacement. We first see her in a final session with her therapist who announces, £You’re ready,” although we note Lana continues to wear a face mask and surgical gloves. Throughout the film she battles severe panic attacks.

We therefore watch the film looking for clues about what set off her mental health issues.

For a start, when back from the therapist, Lana sees news of a massive explosion in Beirut. This is the devastating attack on the Port of Beirut in August 2020 that killed and injured many citizens and left some 300,000 homeless. Lana again experiences panic, practising kick-boxing to calm herself.

We learn that she lives with her Scottish boyfriend, Ben, who is evidently patient with her ongoing anxieties. She learns her estranged father is dying and wants to see her, so she decides to travel to Beirut,  a city she has not visited for 25 years.

The reasons for this estrangement start to emerge when Lana returns to her mother’s Beirut apartment starts to experience flash-backs. We are shown snatches of scenes in which her parents rowed, her father seeming to act violently towards his wife who subsequently died in a car accident. Now back in Beirut, Lana seems reluctant to visit her father: even when she manages to get to the hospital, she is overcome with panic and flees without seeing him.

Two people help her – her male cousin Rami, a married man who’s evidently a bit of a lad. Then there’s Sirine, a gay paramedic who sees that state Lana is in at the hospital and takes care of her. A friendship springs up between the two women. Meanwhile back in London, Ben continues to make forlorn phone calls asking when she’s coming home. Sirine takes Lana on strange outings, and manages to ask some direct personal questions. She finds that Lana has had an issue with sex because of its perceived messiness.

In the period that follows, there are several scenes in which Lana stares silently at buildings and streets that have been destroyed. But we are also shown a strangely beautiful ruined mansion in which people are working together to make it liveable, or simply sit companionably round fires. The story telling is slow-paced, the music signalling the moods the film is trying to create.

It’s never entirely clear where the film is going. We might assume that Lana is going to find true love with her gay friend, Sirine. But there’s a secret only revealed late on which seems to rule this out. Meanwhile there is an oddly troubling sequence where first Lana breaks up with Ben on the phone, and then goes to a party at the impossibly glamorous house of one of her aunties. Everyone is dressed to the nines, and we see the glossy life-style of Rami and Gloria his wife, and their children, only for this to be exposed as a sham – they split up acrimoniously before the night is out.

Rami seems devasted by this, but soon recovers, suggesting Lana joins him at a nightclub where it turns out Sirine is the DJ. This night of drinking and dancing appears to unlock something in Lana, who leaves a tearful phone message to Ben to say she loves him. The end of the film is therefore fairly predictable.

What seems missing from Shadows of Beirut is any sort of real context of the political situation. We hear nothing about who claims responsibility for the explosion, and any sort of message about contemporary Lebanon is left unclear. This therefore leaves the film as simply a personal journey for Lana, the Beirut setting not offering as much as it promises.

Shadows of Beirut will be in UK Cinema from 25th September.