The streets of Beirut are covered in red dirt. Mounds of earth make up barricades along the highway, cars duck around the man-made mountains as they amble down the road. The Lebanese Civil War has been raging for 10 years, and somehow Jocelyne Saab was able to make a fiction film in the midst of the wreckage. The Razor’s Edge follows a teenage girl, Samar (Hala Bassam), and her infatuation with an older artist, Karim (Jacques Weber).
Samar initially stumbles into Karim’s life by being drawn to the house he has his studio in, an old pink mansion near the shores of the Mediterranean. Samar breaks in, wandering around the ghostly palace, looking at the pristine tiles laid about and flipping through books of postcard paintings. She runs around barefoot, accidentally stepping in an errant cloth full of black paint, leaving her print on an unfinished piece. Before slipping away, she steals a pocketwatch hanging in a grandfather clock.
It doesn’t take long for Karim to deduce Samar is the one who left the footprint, leading to a Cinderella-like scene where Samar turns her red-handed (well, black-footed) moment into a dance of girlish obsession, as she makes a whole circle of footprints on Karim’s painting. While Samar’s perspective is of a teenage romantic whimsy, Karim views her with a kind of admiration that also stands in for his view of Beirut and its people. Late in the film, one of Karim’s friends expresses how he’s given up on the city and will return to safety in Canada — Karim feels no inclination to give up on the place he has made home.
Karim is something of an interloper to the destruction, having to pull glass out of his bullet-holed windshield to see better, but he still has the choice to live in the destruction. Samar, on the other hand, was born in it. Beirut, to her, is a city of living death. Soldiers and gunshots are a fact of life, and when she wants to meet up with her best friend, they play amongst the rubble of a bombed-out stadium. The war has effectively closed off the world to her.
Still, Samar is able to dream with the ghosts. Most strikingly, there is a sequence in an abandoned movie house, where the projectionist has become a drunken sniper. Barefoot she walks amongst the broken glass, not a care in the world about getting cut or shot through a window. The place that once projected others’ dreams is now just another palace of death, haunted by the stories that once passed through it. Samar tries to make her own world, but is still trapped between the sea and the barricades, with her imagination not even able to reach as far as “the South,” where most of the heavy fighting is taking place.
The images of a bombed-out Beirut, sadly call to mind the present moment, when Israel invaded the country again in late 2024 after committing a heinous terror attack using pagers in an attempt to make life unlivable for the people of Lebanon. Having passed away in 2019, Jocelyne Saab would not live to know this, nor to see her debut feature The Razor’s Edge restored and revisited on the festival circuit (including its screening as part of NYFF63’s Revivals program). Yet Saab’s film, perhaps tragically, still has much to tell us about our present some 40 years on. As Karim says near the start of the film: “The dead have more to give us than we have to them.”
Published as part of NYFF 2025 — Dispatch 4.
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