The Irish Times - Friday, October 16, 2009

DONALD CLARKE

Directed by Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige. Starring Catherine Deneuve, Rabih Mroue Club, Kino, Cork, 75 min

YOU COULDN'T quite categorise this austere Lebanese art film as a hypno-documentary in the style of the recent, superior Sleep Furiously . But it certainly does have its moments of dreamy introspection.

Watch and listen as voices break through the insistent drone that accompanies a journey through waving grass. Enjoy clanging guitars and images of cars streaking through the Beirut night. Add in a bit of Philip Glass and you've got yourself a chill-out feature.

It seems, however, that Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, academics as well as film-makers, have something a bit more didactic in mind.

Conjuring up memories of Abbas Kiarostami's 10 and every Jean-Luc Godard film made since 1968, the picture begins with an actor named "Catherine Deneuve" (played by Catherine Deneuve) asking to be driven about the devastated outskirts of Beirut on her day off from a film shoot.

The driver (Rabih Mroue) talks Deneuve through the conflict that has made rubble of so many homes and makes jokes about the anarchy that still occasionally characterises Lebanese life. Along the way, they encounter some striking vistas, most notably a beach where much of the detritus from the conflict has wound up.

The driver does point us towards some depressing truths concerning the impossibility of shaking off a violent past. But Je Veux Voir - partly a documentary, partly a low-key drama - is somewhat hampered by its self-importance and by the highfalutin nature of its cultural reference points.

The scene in which the driver begins raving about Belle de Jour , one of Deneuve's most famous films, is certainly queasy enough in its kowtowing to the star. It is, however, far exceeded in preposterousness by an early sequence that finds Beirut citizens peering at Deneuve as she drives by. The driver suggests that they recognise the star and she shakes her head smilingly.

It looks as if you're adopting a posture of sincere modesty, dear, but I really don't think they recognise you. Belle de Jour fans are depressingly thin on the ground these days.