Martyr
Žrtva
Mazen Khaled (2017)
‘Pushing the boundaries of what is conventionally understood as LGBTQ+ cinema, this is not a gay film in the traditional sense. Instead, this hypnotic and beautifully filmed study of homosocial behaviours and societal ritual is a bold and quietly erotic meditation on the male body, shot with a distinctly queer gaze.’ [Note on Martyr by Michael Blyth, BFI Flare Festival 2018 brochure]
My Days of Mercy, which I saw immediately after the Lebanese film Martyr at the Flare Festival, contains several sex scenes with the actresses who play the two main characters undressed. No one is likely to object to the ‘objectification’ of Ellen Page and Kate Mara in these scenes because the film was made by a woman; that Tali Shalom Ezer is (Wikipedia implies) a gay woman is evidently beside the point. As Michael Blyth’s programme note above suggests, exposed male bodies are central to the writer-director Mazen Khaled’s Martyr but the ‘distinctly queer gaze’ exempts his film from criticism as voyeuristic or exploitative – unlike other major gay-themed films of recent years like Blue is the Warmest Colour (2013) and The Handmaiden (2016). When is the contemplation of human bodies in cinema potentially (or even inevitably) offensive? The answer seems to be when the film-maker is male and straight. The self-righteous application of this double standard is vexing.
The better news is that Martyr (unlike My Days of Mercy) is a fine piece of work. The story, set in present-day Beirut, is, in plot terms, very simple. Hassane (Hamza Mekdad) is a young man living at home with his parents (Carol Abboud and Rabi el Zaher). The family isn’t well off, the parents are pushing their son to get a job but Hassane is oppressed by what he sees as the very limited prospects for work and his future. He tells his mother he’ll look for employment tomorrow, preferring to spend today sunbathing and swimming with his friends – male contemporaries from the neighbourhood. A high balustrade divides the rocky shore of the Beirut waterfront from the promenade above. Diving from the balustrade is a popular pastime and spectator sport. Hassane dives there and, in a freak accident, drowns. His friends recover his body and take it back to his home. As his mother and other women gather there to mourn, Hassane’s three friends (Mostafa Fahs, Hady Bou Ayash and Rachad Nassereddine) prepare his corpse for burial. The ritual is dictated, and the film’s title explained, by Islamic law, according to which a person who dies by drowning is a martyr.
The principal focus throughout is Hassane’s body and its interactions with water. Mazen Khaled gives these undivided attention in sequences both imaginary and actual. In a surrealistic prologue and postscript, Hassane’s naked body is viewed underwater from various angles. When he takes a shower at home, his father’s voice interrupts, as well as Hassane’s masturbation, the camera’s concentration on it. As his corpse is washed in the purification ritual before being placed in a white burial shroud, Khaled closes in, as he often did in the prologue, on particular areas of Hassane’s body but more discreetly now, as the dead man’s friends take care to keep his private parts covered. The earlier scenes involving Hassane and one or more of these friends develop a leitmotif of physical proximity and easy intimacy, in which the homosocial verges on the homoerotic – when two of the young men are together on a motor cycle, in the group’s horseplay in the sea, as they sit talking in the sun together. These contacts acquire a tragic resonance in the painfully strenuous efforts of his companions to retrieve Hassane’s body from the sea and carry it back up over the balustrade.
Mazen Khaled and his cinematographers, Rachelle Noja and Talal Khoury, have created an impressive collection of images – imaginatively composed and textured, in some cases synergistic. The moments in which bodies meet water, or are submerged in it, are, by turns, contemplative, ecstatic and explosive. Although Khaled is working out of a different cultural tradition, the shots of Hassane being taken from the waterfront and, on his return home, embraced by his mother naturally suggest to European eyes paintings of Christ’s descent from the Cross and the pieta. What makes Martyr more than a visual essay, and charges the film dramatically, is the sense that Hassane’s death, as well as being a shocking mishap, makes psychological sense. Although it’s not definitely an act of suicide, Hassane can see no future for himself. As Khaled explains in the ‘Director’s notes’ included in the BFI handout:
‘[On the waterfront balustrade in Beirut], two young men died performing trying to please a crowd. … It hit me that the balustrade is the borderline of the city. Those young divers are literally jumping out of society into their freedom. From talking with some of them, I understood that they all come from underprivileged communities in poor neighbourhoods … It struck me that the sea is their liberty, their escape. …’
Khaled gives this idea individual force in a speech, passionately delivered by Hamza Mekdad, in which Hassane laments – to Mhammad, the closest of his friends – his feelings of hopeless suffocation. This is just before the fatal dive.
Hassane drowns about halfway through the film (which runs only 84 minutes). The startling complexity of his death overshadows most of what comes next. This, in combination with the primacy of images in Martyr, tends to overshadow the other characters’ reactions to the accident – even though Mostafa Fahs does an excellent job of showing Mhammad’s earlier divided feelings coalescing into bereft guilt. Khaled may go too far in aestheticisation when, shortly after the drowning, he flashes on screen a montage of stills summarising what will follow in the narrative and in incorporating sequences that are like stage re-enactments of Hassane’s relationship with his mother and with Mhammad (although the latter – a virtual pas de deux – is particularly lovely). Even so, Martyr is intriguing and persuasive – the best film I can remember seeing at recent Flare (or forerunner) festivals.
22 March 2018