Is it time to mourn him? Should they have an official funeral? What if he comes back? Will he hate her for not waiting? She still has his clothes. And what Beckettian foolishness it is to hope for a brighter future in today’s Beirut, the capital of the country in which “one is overwhelmed by the feeling that one’s life has no purpose” (Khalaf 2012).Ĭlaudia knows deep down that Riad will never come back, but she cannot rid herself of the overwhelming, life-inhibiting guilt that she feels. To stop smoking is, after all, to hope, on some level, for a brighter future, or any future. That is the world we inhabit in A Perfect Day’s Beirut. Instinctively, we understand that smoking makes sense in a world where the future is defined by the past, where the present is not something that one aspires to be in, but something in which one is stuck. It is as though the perfect day to start quitting never came.
Throughout the movie, we notice that several characters have been trying to quit smoking for over a decade, or even two. The relationship between Malek and Claudia is set in a Beirut frozen in time, a Beirut that stopped breathing when Riad disappeared, a phenomenon that Laura Bell (2014) described as “frozen grief.” The theme of restlessness therefore dominates A Perfect Day.
#A perfect day 2005 movie#
The movie revolves around three characters: Malek (Ziad Saad), a young man in his early 20s who works in construction and is obsessed with Zeina (Alexandra Kahwagi), his ex-girlfriend who no longer loves him Claudia (Julia Kassar), a mother who lives her days hoping that her husband, Riad, missing for 15 years, would one day return and Riad himself, missing and yet constantly present, “living” through the relationship between Malek and Claudia. Here, the state of latency described above is that of seemingly endless liminality. We see time standing still in another movie: A Perfect Day ( Yawm akhar), directed by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige and released in 2005. It is a memory that has been smothered under the dominant amnesia prevailing since the end of the war, ruins lying under the concrete, something lurking in the town which wants to surge out.
Latency means something that exists without being apparent, but can manifest itself anytime, something dormant that is unfathomable, invisible but that could awake. We often feel we are living in a state of latency, a situation in which things are there but remain unclear. It’s available on (if you have university access) and you can buy it here.įor part 1, click here. The section below is the last one after “ The Ghosts of Lebanon’s Present” and “ Sleepless nights: confessing without the confession” in addition to the conclusion. This is the third excerpt of the book chapter I wrote as part of the book “ The Social Life of Memory: Violence, Trauma, and Testimony in Lebanon and Morocco” edited by Norman Saadi Nikro and Sonja Hegasy and published in November 2017.
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