The Mountain / Al Jabal

A middle-aged man goes to Beirut airport. Supposed to be leaving the country for
a month, but instead of flying off, he hires a car, leaves town and heads north on a
mountain road. Where is he bound? Nothing mysterious about it: a hotel room on
the top floor. Full of riddles, because he chooses to shut himself in and cut himself
off from any contact – a deliberate recluse. If the films of Ghassan Salhab have
already acquainted us with lone wolf characters (Terra Incognita or Beyrouth
Fantôme) and autobiographical notes displayed in all manner of ways (1958), they
were nonetheless always in an urban setting, teeming with people, against a
background of the history of Lebanon, explicitly or via clear allegories. Here, he has
changed direction. Looking down from on high, from the mountains, from the
viewpoint of this hotel room’s shutters – closed ones into the bargain… he dives
down with greater impact than before, down to the depths, beneath the snow, its
whiteness and the faint traces on it, so as to track this obscure, other origin. To
describe the paradoxical, sometimes almost immobile gymnastics that Deleuze
used to call ‘the act of creation’ – this is the challenge this great film-maker has set
himself here. This black and white film, in which sumptuous grey areas clearly
suggest the need for infinite nuances and which is carried by an actor both towering
and magnificently secretive, nods in passing to Johnny Cash as Louis-René des
Forêts. It raises a serious and time-honoured question in an original way: how do
you make a work of art in time of war? (JPR)