When films with strong women characters, aimed at a largely female audience, came out of Hollywood, they patronisingly dubbed them 'women’s pictures" or 'women’s melodramas". It was patronising because male-oriented stories were never subjected to that kind of exceptionalist thinking – they were, say, 'war films’ or 'gangster pictures’, but never 'men’s movies’.
The word 'melodrama’ has a surprisingly large number of accepted meanings and often invites various levels of opprobrium according to the context in which it is used. This 1970s Beirut-set Lebanese film, despite its macho title and references to the nation’s former civil war, is something of a melodrama in a respectable sense of the word, a female-centric drama in which intense feelings predominate.
This much is obvious from the first scene, where four women of different ages swap greetings outside the Christian church where one of their number, the 30-year-old Doha (Nadine Labaki), is in a fortnight to be married to a man named John (Nazih Youssef). As viewers soon discover, Doha is having second thoughts and secretly meets Joseph (Rodrigue Sleiman), her ex. They drive out to the woods outside Beirut to find some peace and quiet, but things go badly wrong when they witness a violent event.
As an intertitle tells viewers at the start of the film, the setting is 'the end of the summer in 1976" and 'all Palestinian camps have surrendered. The war seems to be over." Note the word 'seemed". That description is both precise (not just summer, please note, but 'the end of summer") and, at least for a non-specialist western audience, rather vague, since it assumes some knowledge of that nation’s former civil war between Muslims and Christians – though in the end this proves to be no impediment. Just as the film seems to be slipping into an unexpected genre – a 'masculine’ war film? – it shifts gears back into relationship-melodrama mode. As a result, the narrative appears broken-backed.
Nadine Labaki, as Doha, is best known to Australian audiences for her starring role in the hairdresser story Caramel a couple of years ago. She’s one of those female actors who combine glamorous looks with serious acting skills. Indeed so glam does she appear throughout that her family’s insistence that Doha is at imminent risk of turning into an old maid like her sister, Layla (Takla Chammoun), if she doesn’t get married, looks not only foolish but lacking in credibility. What man wouldn’t crawl over broken glass to marry such a sublimely beautiful and strong-willed woman? Here we just have to either give up, or trust that cultural expectations are really that different in Lebanon and go with the flow.
Stray Bullet won the top prize at the most recent Dubai Film Festival. Without having seen all the films it was competing against, it’s impossible to judge the degree to which that honour was deserved, but while the film is a respectably acted throughout, it struck this viewer as lacking in the kind of wow factor that excites imaginations and deserves prizes. While engaging and polished, it nonetheless raises expectations of a more fascinatingly complex narrative that for whatever reasons it declines to deliver.
