YARA (Abbas Fahdel, 2018): Lebanon

Reviewed by: Matthew Dagenais, AFI Film Festival, Hollywood, CA

Yara is a delightfully light paced romance that teases the audience and portrays the values of both modern and baroque lifestyles.  Yara lives on a mountain in Lebanon with her Grandmother.  Beautiful panoramic long shots of the valley below will have your eyes going dry you wont want to miss a second of these breath-taking scenes.  Yara and her Grandmother live a very hard working yet simple life that consists of farm work.  They have many goats and chickens they care for on their land that you can hear constantly throughout the film, this is due to the intended importance of nature and its role in the theme of the film.  An older gentleman with two boys comes and delivers supplies to Yara and her Grandmother this is how they survive and trade with other people in the valley.  Early on in the film a young man by the name of Elias comes across Yara’s home while he is hiking, he surprises her while she’s hanging her undergarments to dry and their romance begins at first sight.  Although he is just a passing traveler, Yara is very intrigued by the boy and his modern ways.  Elias is from Australia and was brought up in a more modernized town and he has a very busy cellphone.

Yara who has lived on the mountain her entire life does not know the complexity of these technological advances and simply does not care to learn.  She enjoys her happy, simple life in the valley with her grandmother.  This cellphone although so small, is a very repetitive motif throughout the entirety of the film that symbolizes the separation of a very simple VS  somewhat complicated lifestyle.  Too add to idea of simplicity in the mountain life, the use of a lengthy timed close up shot of the Grandma just sitting outside, enjoying the air and sun. Although this was a very powerful shot it made an already slow paced romantic film just that much slower.  Their is not a whole lot of spoken dialogue in this film and when there is an interaction it is usually very short and simple since the film is completely spoken in Arabic, the use of English subtitles was a little bit strange at times when reading what they were saying compared to what they were doing on the screen, being the languages are so different. It was like bad improve at times.  Too add to the dullness of this film there was a repetitive Medium shot sequence of the home, the goats, the chickens, and the dog, in which very loud animal sounds accompanied them. It was just too repetitive for me and I lost interest after about half way through the film.

The most dialogue in the film was when Elias and Yara had their interactions.  Their conversations were very real, as Yara did not know anything about social media there was no silly things to talk about.  All their engagements were very romantic you could tell they were both very interested in each other and they would ask each other daring questions that one might not ask someone they just met, they developed a trust between them very quickly because of the necessity to only talk about values, dreams, and personal fundamentals.  Overall I thought the film was very well done, a little slow, but well directed, well shot, and Michelle Whebe (YARA) + Elias Freifer (Elias) made a really great cast they both played their rolls amazingly well and really fit the romantic scene well together.