A meta-documentary on the poetics of cyclical destruction comes to the screen.
Lana Daher’s Do You Love Me has the unfortunate designation of this year’s most topical film at the 55th edition of MoMA’s New Directors/New Films. Three days prior to the April 11 screening of the Lebanese national’s layered archival work, over 100 hundred Israeli airstrikes pounded several densely populated Beirut neighborhoods in less than 10 minutes. Over 350 people were killed in what’s been considered the city’s deadliest day since the end of the Lebanese Civil War in 1990. That these two threads of monumental calamity should enter into conversation on the eve of this debut is an almost cosmic underscoring of the film’s brutal and unflinching portrait of a country inexorably bound to its passions.
The bloody punctuation mark is not only thematic in nature, but physically assimilative as well, as Daher and editor Qutaiba Barhamji incorporated the vibrational thrum of Israeli drones that hovered above their Beirut studio into the ambient soundscape of Do You Love Me (as revealed in a post-screening Q&A). The work is integrative at its core, with equal weight ascribed to the sounds, colors, and motions that coalesce around this inapprehensible Mediterranean nation. And while there is ample room, as ever, for exploring the ineluctable perils that have marred this coastal flashpoint for millennia, this is ultimately an expansive film, one that draws upon over 20,000 hours of archival material to present a Lebanon of ardor, exhortation, and tragic contradiction.
Lebanon has long been considered a synthesis of the Middle East’s most consequential tendencies. Swinging haphazardly between paroxysmic violence and consociational stagnation, the country’s sectarian nightmare of tripartite religious demography remains an inescapable foundational sin. Its sovereignty has seemingly remained subject to the whims of geopolitical power players both near and abroad, held hostage by proxies that span a nauseatingly exhaustive breadth of ideologies and state sponsors (everything from Soviet-backed Pan-Arabic socialist Ba’athists to Christian Phalangist militias). Internecine fighting and the constantly shifting grounds of allegiance and rivalry have cultivated a kind of socio-political schizophrenia, with a diffuse national identity often subordinate to ancient confessional traditions and the lurching crises of modernity. Daher’s film gives potent language to the spirit of this Lebanon that finds itself in constant confrontation with these protean and often destructive forces, a visual vernacular that hones in on the country’s prismatic interplay between honor, tradition, the erotic, violence, and art.
Do You Love Me is notable not only for the voices that it foregrounds, but also for the ones that it omits – namely those of politicians or institutional actors. This is a refreshing and daring choice that provides its themes even greater spatial latitude for the levity and play of archival experimentation to thrive and invigorate. Occasionally visual mosaics of this sort can tip towards the discursive.
Seductive are the siren calls of the ever-infinite range of thematic avenues that archival footage offers, and there is a kind of messianic appeal to the creative power of association, however manic or wandering. Daher expertly avoids these pitfalls without resorting to narrative convention, and in doing so establishes a rhythm of expression that feels true to the mercurial forces at the core of Lebanese nationhood. Bloody martyrdom stands athwart a man staring into the sea. Feature film footage captures the wistful faces of women in a car interior. An anonymous voice contemplates the irreparable, condemning a nation which would sacrifice its youth to protect its enduring lies.
These are sprawling threads that Do You Love Me manages to coax into evocative meaning, unveiling a language of nationhood that has transcended generations and regimes alike; the microcosmic and world-historical cycles indelible and embedded into the national condition are the true protagonists of this story. The film’s latter half settles into a subliminal linearity, and it is this meditative valence that evinces something uniquely tragic – the hypnotic, samsaric logic of this fraught national project.
