Allo chérie

Driving her car through Beirut, a woman – the filmmaker’s mother to whom this essay is dedicated – calls her banks, her lawyer, her friends, her creditors and their intermediaries. “Norma, dear, get him to sign the cheque today!” But the “dears” showered on the secretaries are to no avail: Jeannette says she is at her wits’ end, exhausted by worry and insomnia, even if the speed at which she makes call upon call suggests that she still has some verbal fuel to spare. Friendly interludes, chats with her friends underline the chasm between the nerve-wracking urgency of her situation (“I’m scared they’ll kidnap my son! I’ve worked with gangsters…”) and the bantering humour of some interlocutors (“A hundred-and-ten-year-old woman had a baby yesterday.”). The rapid succession of her phone calls coupled with what seems to be a circular drive round (the shot on the fairground’s unmoving big wheel) mixes this slightly suspenseful anguish with an absurdity that rises out of the immediate situation to reach an existential dimension. Negotiation, lamentation, confidence, supplication: the editing of this marathon of words joins up the different discourses, struggling against the sinews of war: money. (Charlotte Garson)