Hors la vie (1991) - film review

Patrick Perrault, a photo-journalist covering the war in Beirut in the late 1980s, is himself caught up in the hostilities when one day he is picked up and bundled into a car at gun-point.  Blind-folded, he is taken to an unknown location where he discovers that he is being taken hostage by Lebanese guerrillas.  Robbed of his passport, stripped and forced to change into a pair of damp pyjamas, he is locked up in a cell from which there is no escape.  And he is told that if he takes of his blindfold to see his captors he will be shot dead immediately.  So begins his long and brutal nightmare...

With its shocking realism and ability to rekindle memories of the terrible Lebanese civil war of the 1980s, Hors la vie is a film which cannot leave its spectator unmoved.  From the first scene, as the credits roll across the screen, we are plunged into the crucible of terror and despair which tore the country apart.  Having almost overwhelmed its audience with some truly terrible images, the film zooms in on one lone character, a French photo-journalist, who himself ends up on the wrong side of his camera and becomes part of the living tragedy that was Beirut.

The film’s director, Maroun Bagdadi, evokes perhaps better than anyone could, the sense of relentless futility, illogicality, injustice and pathos of the war, by portraying the effect it has on all those it touched.  Bagdadi, himself born in Lebanon, clearly has a profound love for the country, its people, its culture, even its landscape, and this shows in virtually every scene of this film, but most clearly in the dialogue.  Amidst the senseless carnage we see at the start of the film, the rocket attacks which punctuate the drama from time to time, and, most noticeably, in the relationship between Perrault and his captors, we glimpse something of the beauty, charm and despair of the country and its people.

The film’s focal point in the photographer Perrault, based on a real-life hostage victim Roger Auque, and played by Hippolyte Girardot in what is truly a remarkable performance.  Girardot is thoroughly compelling in what is, by anyone’s standard, a fine piece of acting.  The terror and anguish of the prisoner, not knowing when, or even if, he is going to be set free are totally believable in Girardot’s performance, as is the sense of frustration and heartache that the country he loves has turned against him.   He manages, effortlessly, to draw the audience into his fragmented, solitary world, to the extent that every torment he experiences has a palpable effect on the spectator.

Bagdadi’s approach for this film is closer to a documentary than a traditional cinematic drama, and it is this perhaps more than anything which gives the films its impact and sense of veracity.  There are no villains or heroes in this film.  Although Perrault’s captors are seen doing some terrible things to their prisoner (some of which will undoubtedly shock – this is not a film for the squeamish), they are not portrayed as unfeeling monsters.  Indeed, the relationship between hostage and captor often appears fraternal, to the extent that an indelible bond is apparently forged between them.  Between the threats of instant execution and humiliating maltreatment, you can easily discern a tenderness and mutual respect, a subtlety you would not expect to find in a conventional film.

After a harrowing and emotionally draining journey in the mind of a hostage, the film ends with a beautifully melancholic sequence which transports us through the ruins of a war-wrecked city.  We are not told what fate awaits our hero, but, in the incomprehensible tragedy that is Beirut, that hardly seems to matter.  Life goes on.

The film met with critical acclaim on its initial release and won Maroun Bagdadi the coveted Jury Prize at the Cannes film festival in 1991.  Sadly, having established himself as possibly one of the finest directors of his generation, Bagdadi himself was to be the victim of tragedy.  He made one further film, La fille de l’air in 1992, before his tragic death in an accident in Beirut in 1993.   If Hors la vie tells us anything at all, it is that this comparatively young director had so much more to say.

© James Travers 2000

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