As social emergencies go, few have the symbolic clarity of a waste crisis. They are ugly. They stink. They indicate dysfunction, rot and toxicity in ways that do not require sorting.
They are also an effective shortcut to dramatic poignancy, as the Lebanese director Mounia Akl demonstrates in her ambitious first feature, ‘Costa Brava, Lebanon’. But if it sounds like an easy metaphor, blame history: Beirut has been choking on garbage for years — including, but hardly limited to, the kind you bag.
Set in a dystopian near future indistinguishable from the present, the film’s setting is less of a space for imagination than for cynicism: the more things change, the more they stay the same. The recycle bin is still a problem. The leaders are still corrupt.
Perhaps it could be different in the countryside, where a family struggles to maintain an off-grid Eden. Years earlier, Souraya (Nadine Labaki), a famous singer, escaped there to start a family with her husband, Walid (Saleh Bakri), a disillusioned and damaged former activist. But after a government land requisition literally brings the waste to their door, the fragility of their small ecosystem becomes apparent.
Souraya wonders if Beirut was really that bad. Their teenage daughter (Nadia Charbel) dreams of boys and a bigger world. Their other daughter (Ceana and Geana Restom) is too young to give up on her father, but she has also absorbed his trauma, ravaged by the obsessive-compulsive delusion that counting can control the surrounding chaos.
The paradise these characters seek might as well be the title’s Spanish shores, however elusive. If a fuller sense of their humanity is sometimes lost in the ideas they serve, Akl has nevertheless made a clever and sensitive film.
Costa Brava, Lebanon
Not judged. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theatres.