There’s a lot to take from A Sad and Beautiful World, the feature debut from documentarian Cyris Aris, ostensibly a straight-faced drama of love in a time of war, but what one might not expect is a darkly affecting genre subversion. There’s an unacknowledged privilege to the great American romantic comedy, an assumption of the possibility of happy endings — that if minds are set to it, love can conquer anything. There’s a reason its last great heyday fell in the period that was touting itself as the end of global conflict. The point is, as much as this writer may have wished missiles to reign down on the characters of Richard Curtis, the incendiary state of much of the world is a spanner in the works of the rom-com form. It’s a privilege generally unacknowledged, one that Aris’ film exposes without hand-wringing or sanctimony, just clear-eyed honesty.
The film’s setup is as traditional as you like. We follow Nino (Hasan Akil) and Yasmina (Mounia Akl), two childhood friends who meet again as adults after a chance encounter and, despite their differences, begin to fall in love. See, straightforward as they come. But — and it’s a big but — they are in Beirut, and war colors their lives, with flashbacks revealing how it has shaped them into the two people that have met again in the present and how it will define their future.
What really works in A Sad and Beautiful World is how committed and surprisingly equipped it is at adpting the shape of the romantic comedy in its early stages. It’s genuinely funny and romantic in a way you viewers aren’t so conditioned to expect these days, particularly given its setup, and more particularly given the way the film moves in its latter stages. But early, it features a terrific meet-cute when Nino crashes into Yasmina’s office, and there’s a lovely feeling to the respective worlds each inhabit, their surrounding characters all realized far beyond the one-note duffers that populate many an example of the genre. A lot of this hinges on the chemistry of the two leads, which is crackling and warm, and both the love and the difficulties enmeshing their lives is totally convincing and authentic, an accumulation of playful glances and charged conversations.
The key is that A Sad and Beautiful World never feels like it’s using the genre itself as a target on its way to its broader point, but instead gives everything to the romance at its core in the way its characters do, which makes it all the more painful when the weight of war begins to turn the film’s opening hopefulness on its head. When Yasmina becomes pregnant, the question of the morality of bringing a child into a war-torn world consumes her in a way it doesn’t Nino, and from there we quickly jump ahead to their life with said child. A heaviness fills the film, its momentum becomes chaotic, hope curdles quickly into new problems. The whole film becomes tinged with the sunken feeling of it all slipping away from them.
This latter half of the film is incredibly adept in the way it articulates the feeling of life tumbling apart, and the work that has been put into setting up rom-com expectations pays absolute dividends as you watch their happy ending drift out of focus. That said, you can’t help the feeling that a lot of what the film is actively trying to talk about is underdeveloped, and there’s the sense that Aris is lending only the impression to a lot of issues without properly grappling with them. It’s a miscalibration that can make the film’s latter stages feel less well-realized than its rom-com parts, with the clear handle of character it demonstrated early on slipping just a touch as it tries to juggle too much at once. Still, there’s no denying that A Sad and Beautiful World is an impressive first swing at features from Aris, one that is at its best when leaning into its emotive core, something it pulls off with genuine intensity, charm, and heart.
DIRECTOR: Cyril Aris; CAST: Mounia Akl, Hasan Akil, Camille Salameh, Julia Kassar, Tino Karam; DISTRIBUTOR: Watermelon Pictures; IN THEATERS: July 24; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 50 min.
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