Martyr Directed by Mazen Khaled

Martyr

Directed by Mazen Khaled

Starring: Hamza Mekdad, Hadi Bou Ayash, Carol Abboud, Rabih el Zaher, Moustafa Fahs,

Raneem Mourad, Mazen Khaled, Selim Mourad walk

Year: 2017

Country: Lebanon, Italy

Author Review: Roberto Matteucci

"He's a martyr."

For a Muslim believer the funeral is composed of four parts.

The first is the complete ablution of the corpse, followed by the wrapping in odd shrouds, the prayer of the dead, and the burial. Water is the dominant and main element, it is the element that purifies the physical including that of a body of a dead person. (1)

Starts with a total ablution the movie Martyr of Lebanese director Mazen Khaled, presented at 74th Venice International Film Festival.

Hassane is a young man. To the beginning, we see him static in tight close-up. There is a black sudden cut then return on the boy's body; the camera enters in the detail of the skin even in its imperfections. When the camera widens we observe him naked, with a perfect expression of detachment and ecstasy. Later we understand, he's inside a cistern full of water.

At this beginning, there are the topics of understanding history: water, the human body, life and death.

From the surreal atmosphere of the tank, we arrive in Beirut. From the roofs, full of parables typical of the Middle Eastern, with so much light we enter in a house. Hassane is sleeping, his parents arrive and we understand the tension inside the family.

From the words of the parents we have a description of the guy: unemployed, always out to wander with friends, with little attachment to duties and responsibilities. A boy as so many, nothing to worry about. It is the introspective phase of the knowledge of generational discomforts.

His malaise is represented by many close-ups of the young man, included the details of his sensual body, Hassane desires to masturbate in the bathroom, blocked by his father's calls.

Despite promising to go looking for a job, Hassane escapes with his friends to the sea.

The rocks are crowded but exclusively of male people. Hassane is with a group of affectionate friends, who knew for a while. He first met with another group of friends, who abandoned for so many social differences, for different values of life. In one sequence the director narrates this feeling, while the boys are at sea without doing anything, chatting and gossiping, the director alternates the beach scene with a shot of so many students, certainly bourgeois, while they are walking in the street, wearing in the head the mortarboard, with their parents following. It's their day of happiness, that of graduation. It is one of the first inequalities shown by the director with a simple alternating editing.

These guys are going to graduate, they have a hope, a secure future. Hassane and his friends oppose them with their physicality, with their corporal games, with their carnal proximity, but what is their future?

On the beach something tragic happens, an absurd challenge, against the family, against the difficulty of having friends, against the social and economic differences; however it happens. It is an insane competition, even more, insane because Hassane's friends do not stop him.

The second part reveals the return home. The homecoming is unhappy both for pain and because it causes a contrast between the two groups.

But in front of the death, the wise father - "let us understand the meaning of life" - gives him the opportunity to reconcile and understand the value of life, which also includes, obviously, the death, restoring the religious meaning of the existence.

Of the four phases of the funeral ceremony, ablution is the first and it is the most important because with it we can understand the caducity of life. Just people of the same sex of the dead can be completed the ablution. The water of the first scene returns: the total bath of Hassane in the great tub.

Mazen Khaled is meticulous and sophisticated in the shots. Often in the director's first work, there is the tendency to exaggerate in the abundance of the particular, in the exasperation of the philosophy of the image. But they are venial sins because the film always maintains a strong dose of emotion thanks to the search for the beauty of the shots.

Therefore, during the ablution, after washing, the water drains from the catafalque to the pipe, and then ends in the sewer. The metaphor: life is ephemeral, we all have to finish in a drain no matter how much we were proud, conceited in life.

Death has a definitive solution, which happens, as far as we common mortals know, in the body. Spirit and soul have other destinations of which we do not have physical sense, this feeling must exist only in our heart.

The director tells the comparison, the paradox of the two moments: life and death. In the scenes set at the sea, the author devotes himself to the two primary elements: water and male bodies.

The boys talk about women, they look them from afar, but Martyr is exclusively a masculine film. All Beirut guys have the same behaviour perhaps to oppose the total absence of women.

Women have a limited existence on the margins.

But Mazen Khaled has an intelligent vision. Not being able to mix women with men - even during the ablutions the women are locked in other room - the director imagines a totally female ballet in black and white. They express their affective and suffering presence, limited to that moment.

But synchronized movements belong to the author's language. There are much slow ballets, the director joints young and good-looking actors, who move like soft and sinuous dancers. In the house of Hassane, the two groups of friends perform on the screen with elegance and harmony.

But the director has a strong predisposition toward the body and the physicist. He creates numerous still images as if they were tableau vivant. From the initial scene, many shots are static to stimulate feeling. When friends pick up their dead friend, they hold him narrow, tight, immovable with all their strength. They are close to him, the boys touch each other, they come into physical contact, they are embraced, the hands are joined.

The critic Mark Cousins mentions Pier Paolo Pasolini:

"Martyr is like a Pasolini movie: Beautiful and tender, it captures the sacred aspect of the bodies, of youth, of male friendship, a remarkable film and one of the best at the 2017 Venice Biennale." (2)

Pasolini in the Ricotta resumes a tableau vivant of the wonderful The Deposition by Jacopo da Pontormo of the Chapel of the Church of Santa Felicita in Florence. The picture represents the religious feeling of Jesus' mother and friends.

The same thought is in Mazen Khaled, telling the same feeling of the martyr's mother and friends, using the same harmonic language.

Is Hassane a martyr?

It is undoubtedly a boy of our time, with a generational conflict, a social dispute, represented by two groups of friends.

The director is able to describe scenes with a bodily presence, drawing the guys' movements with elegance, and using all the available languages. In a desperate scene, friends run to help a dying Hassane, he uses the hand-held camera.

The recitation of actors is super because they unite the carnal presence with a social and religious interpretation. All the boys are committed to ablution in a complete and exact manner. It is their social and religious duty.

Hamza Mekdad interprets Hassane focusing on his body with great accuracy of the role.

Among friends, there is the talented Hadi Bou Ayash already seen in the Lebanese film Ismaii.

(1) Alessandro Bausani, Islam, Garzanti, Milan, fourth reprint July 2006

(2) https://www.facebook.com/pg/Martyr.movie.leb/posts/?ref=page_internal