Illustrations by Niklas Wesner.
This is the first in a series of short essays considering notable film restorations of the last year.
The Razor’s Edge (Jocelyne Saab, 1985).
The Razor’s Edge (Ghazl el-banat, 1985) opens in a city of the dead, the camera panning slowly across a graveyard crowded with markers. But the film is about a city of the living—people living with death, in a place where destruction is as ordinary and inescapable as the weather. Set during the Lebanese Civil War, Jocelyne Saab’s lyrical yet unsparing film savors moments of resilience and grace: two girls walking with heavy cans of water balanced easily on their heads; the same girls dancing joyously in the shattered ruins of a stadium. It also observes tableaux of the grotesque and the absurd: small boys with toy Kalashnikovs playing war games and acting out martyrs’ funerals amid the rubble; a sniper firing potshots at “enemy birds.” The people of Beirut take refuge in morbid poetry (an artist says of his friend’s bullet-pocked vehicle, “The stars of death are on your car”), and in a sensuous, slightly delirious liberation from ordinary rules of propriety and workaday routines. They never seek solace in hope, or in any pretense that there is a meaning or purpose behind their endless suffering.
I watched a new restoration of The Razor’s Edge at Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna in June 2025, as Israel continued its deadly assault on Gaza, the United States dropped bombs on Iran, and Russia pushed on with its relentless attacks in Ukraine. The film is a tender and vibrant love poem to Saab’s native Beirut, but it was impossible not to reflect on how much the backgrounds—incorporating documentary footage the director had shot as a journalist—looked like the images appearing on the news every day. Pulverized buildings, bodies in the streets, bands of refugee children: the universal signifiers of modern warfare. Saab’s earlier documentaries captured voices from different factions of the complex civil and regional wars that overwhelmed Lebanon beginning in the mid-1970s, but in The Razor’s Edge, her first narrative feature, we learn absolutely nothing about the conflict. Who is fighting whom, and why? For the citizens eking out a precarious, makeshift existence amid stray bullets and collapsed homes, it does not seem to matter.
The Razor’s Edge (Jocelyne Saab, 1985).
As a child, Saab was discouraged from pursuing filmmaking, told it wasn’t “a job for girls.” Instead, she studied political economy and became a journalist, working as a war correspondent in Egypt, Lebanon, and Libya, then in 1975 directed her first feature documentary. The Razor’s Edge, which she wrote with French screenwriter Gérard Brach and Samir Sayegh, was substantially reedited for a 1988 limited release under the title A Suspended Life. The 2025 restoration, by the Association Jocelyne Saab in collaboration with the Cinémathèque Suisse and La Cinémathèque Québecoise, reconstructs the original version presented at Cannes in 1985, where it bore yet another alternate French title: L’Adolescente, sucre d’amour (The girl, sweetheart). These three starkly different titles reflect the dizzying range of tones that coexist in the film: the voluptuous sweetness of sunlight, color, and sensual pleasures; a state of dreamlike suspension and unreality; and the cruel, fine line between living and dying.
The adolescent is Samar (Hala Bassam), a fifteen-year-old whose family have arrived in Beirut as refugees and survive by collecting, restoring, and selling roof tiles from damaged buildings. She makes the most of the freedom granted by chaos, an irony that the film reveals without comment. Though her mother chides her for “going off in the streets of the city,” and her younger brother violently assails her for dishonoring the family by going with men, no one stops her from wandering around alone, exploring ruins and unguarded houses. She becomes enthralled by a mysterious pink villa and finds her way in, prowling through rooms cluttered with elegant furnishings, steeped in an elegiac vision of decaying cosmopolitanism. (The place is “better than the movies,” she tells a friend.) She plucks a fruit from a tree in the overgrown garden and inhales its aroma, leafs through an album of old color postcards of Beirut, and steals a broken silver pocket watch.
The Razor’s Edge (Jocelyne Saab, 1985).
Eventually, she forms an unlikely friendship with the villa’s owner, Karim (French actor Jacques Weber), a middle-aged artist—melancholy, disillusioned, kind—who paints webs of sinuous Arabic calligraphy. She brings him fresh strawberries. He teaches her to write her name in Roman letters, guiding her finger through sand—a fitting image for the ephemerality of adolescence, and of life itself in wartime. But she leaves a more permanent trace during her first, clandestine visit to the house, walking over a canvas laid out on the floor and inadvertently making an inky footprint. Later, he solves the mystery by matching her bare foot to the print, and she turns it into an artwork, treading in a circle to leave a ring of black steps, writing with her dancing body.
Their bond remains platonic, though Samar eventually declares her love for Karim. He sees her as a child—and at times she appears as one, a lanky girl roaming the streets with a pack of younger kids. But she is also on the cusp of womanhood, and she is conscious of and excited by her own beauty as she dances seductively in front of a mirror, willowy and lithe, with hair falling to her waist. She has already lost her virginity, though we never learn when or how, and has a secret operation to restore it in preparation for marriage. (“What I do is like embroidery,” the woman performing the trick says, assuring Samar and her mother that not even the most scrupulous husband will notice.) Her friendship with the cultured, French-speaking Karim—crossing boundaries of age, sex, class, and education—blossoms amid war’s erasure of normal life. Time has stopped like the broken watch, leaving an almost luxurious sense of indolence amid the ever-present threat of sudden violence.
The Razor’s Edge (Jocelyne Saab, 1985).
With ruthless logic, Samar reasons, “Without the war, I wouldn’t have met you. So, the war is good.” She has lived most of her life in wartime; her matter-of-fact toughness is very different from the grief and bitterness of older people who have watched the world they knew disintegrate. Karim’s friend Juliette (Juliet Berto) breaks down during a nighttime bombing raid, and has a perennially edgy, shell-shocked look. Berto’s presence conjures memories of her role in Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), forging a link to that film’s intrepid feminist spirit and its freewheeling departure from narrative realism.
In The Razor’s Edge, a slightly heightened sense of the quotidian poetry and strangeness of wartime—fighters brewing coffee at roadside barricades, families camping out in an abandoned palazzo where a mural depicts the Manhattan skyline—gradually gives way to surrealism and phantasmagoria. Hallucinatory visions are at times hard to distinguish from real events. Samar has a bizarre friendship with a one-eyed sniper who lives in a cavernous abandoned building, amid a sea of empty bottles and a refrigerator filled with guns. The two of them bark at each other like dogs. Play is a form of resistance, but also a way of adapting to the world’s madness.
The Razor’s Edge (Jocelyne Saab, 1985).
At the end, this theater of the absurd is made literal, when Karim and Samar enter a dilapidated playhouse. On the stage, Karim recites Beckett in French (“I must go on, I can’t go on”), spelling out a message that was already clear. In the only section of the film that feels overthought and less assured, Saab piles up different endings, zig-zagging between documentary simplicity and elaborate artifice. A scene of raw, understated tragedy is followed by a bombastic pageant in which the same theater is filled with people swathed in cobwebs, moaning in exhausted sorrow, and on the stage the war becomes a histrionic spectacle of flames and anguish. This in turn gives way to a lovely final shot of boys playing at the seafront. Life can’t go on, it must go on.
The rediscovery of The Razor’s Edge is a reminder that even the fragile, febrile medium of film can be more lasting than concrete, to say nothing of flesh. Much of the urban fabric that appears in the film has vanished—the rubble rebuilt and the buildings left standing later destroyed—and exists now only in the images painted by light on the screen. Cities are living things, constantly changing, reabsorbing their own ruins. They are also haphazard monuments to all those who have passed through them. Why do people love their cities so much, staying even when life becomes nearly impossible? Perhaps because they are part of a story, written in the looping calligraphy of their daily walks, traced by their fingers in shifting sands. When Karim asks Samar how old she is, she replies, “Five thousand years. I am the city. I am Beirut.”
Continue reading Notebook’s 2025 Year in Review.