I USED TO SLEEP ON THE ROOFTOP

How to talk about things? How to pinpoint degrees of importance? How to unveil without betraying? How to be accurate without claiming to sell information? Ever since it was created, has cinema not been about inventing this very gesture, elemental yet complex, very easy albeit sophisticated? We do answer in the affirmative and the oh so beautiful first film by Angie Obeid provides baffling and dazzling evidence of this. What does this picture rest upon? Upon Nuhad’s – one of the two heroines – wait and how she responds to it. Undoubtedly there is this but also so much more, since the wait itself is far too pedestrian. Or it may rest upon the horoscope spoken by Nuhad day in day out, and the way it is woven into a script. Maybe so, but again there is more to it, since scripts dry themselves out before drying us of their bounded future. Upon what then? We may, nay we should, lay stress on how precise and firm each composition, each frame, each shot is. For nothing here is arbitrary, nothing is built without a mirror, nothing here is produced by a gaze without love. Every single thing has been gauged, weighted, evaluated: loved, for what other word is there? Nobody, in spite of what the title fallaciously makes us expect, has left the set to escape onto the terrace. Quite obviously, the scenes where the two women share the space are, literally so, the most astounding ones; through these is an unsettled present expressed, but a present that clings to walls, as though a provisional cell had suddenly morphed into a haven. (JPR)