Sad, Beautiful, and True: Love in Lebanon

Cinema is usually a little dishonest about love. Most films quietly edit out everyone and everything that shaped each lover before the other one arrived — the families and the exes, the accumulated weight of a whole life — and call what’s left a love story. It isn’t. It’s a fantasy arranged for two.

Cyril Aris’s stellar first fiction feature, A Sad and Beautiful World, understands this instinctively. Quietly devastating and deeply humane, it is more emotionally intricate than most of the grander, louder romances that reach the multiplex. On its surface, it is a decades-long story of two lives that never quite align at the right moment. Underneath, it is a portrait of what love has to survive when the country it is being lived in refuses to stand still. Most love stories are set in a country; Aris’s is set against one — in this case, a Lebanon churning through a generation’s worth of political and economic upheaval, which applies its pressure to every decision its lovers make.

It begins with a missed train. A young Yasmina (Alex Choueiry) tells her classmate Nino (Mohamad Farhat) to meet her at an abandoned railroad car, from which they will launch their journey to a life free of teachers and parents. He arrives. She doesn’t. No explanation, no apology, no sign of her. For years.

Over a dozen years later, young adult Nino (Hasan Akil) crashes his car into a building after an incident beyond his control. This jarring entrance is hardly your normal meet-cute, but it’s also a fitting metaphor. In this world, people are constantly colliding with structures they did not build and cannot easily escape. Later, in an act of apology and grace, he serves dinner at his eponymous restaurant to the family affected by the accident — only to discover it is Yasmina’s (Mounia Akl). In lesser hands, such coincidence would feel contrived. Here it feels like fate arriving late, and slightly damaged.

 Aris writes tragedy and comedy as if the two were intertwined — inhabiting the same scenes and often the same breath.

The film spans roughly three decades and is structured in three chapters: childhood, reunion, and something resembling a life built together. By the time Nino crashes back into Yasmina’s life, she is poised to leave Lebanon altogether in search of opportunity elsewhere. We pick up with them again some eight years after that, torn over whether to stay in the country they love or find a better life for their family elsewhere. Lives forever adjacent, forever nearly touching, always diverted by forces both personal and historical.

Complicating matters, the two could not be more different. Nino, despite carrying private grief and disappointment, remains almost irrationally optimistic. He believes life will reward patience. Yasmina is his opposite: intelligent, practical, sharpened by disappointment — she is a woman who has learned that hope can be expensive. He leans toward sentiment; she leans toward survival. Neither is wrong. Their dynamic gives the film much of its charge, thanks largely to great acting by the leads.

And there is unexpected humor as well. Aris writes tragedy and comedy as if the two were intertwined — inhabiting the same scenes and often the same breath. There is dark humor, the kind that the Lebanese have perfected over generations as a way of surviving whatever history is asking of them, and lighter humor too: offbeat digressions, sly character business, the occasional flourish in the score that feels closer to an indie comedy than a war-adjacent drama. Aris has described humor as an inherent part of Lebanese identity — a coping mechanism that hardens over time into something closer to a worldview.

Lebanon itself is the film’s most ominous presence — a milieu that seems to be lurking just off screen at all times.

The real drama of their adult chapters is not whether Nino and Yasmina will find each other — they do, repeatedly — but whether finding each other is enough. Every large question that, in a long relationship, is usually spread across decades comes at them at once: Should they stay together? Should they marry? Where should they build a life? Should they bring a child into a country that can’t promise it a future? In a calmer place, these would be the ordinary negotiations of adulthood. In theirs, each decision is torqued by the turmoil outside, where tomorrow refuses to hold still long enough for anyone to plan around it. Nino wants to stay. Having lost his parents when he was young, Lebanon itself seems to have become his last remaining home, the only address he still recognizes. Yasmina wants to go wherever the life they are trying to build stands the best chance of surviving; she loves the country too, but she is practical enough to know that love cannot raise a child by itself. That is why, when they wound each other, the wounds go so deep.

Lebanon itself is the film’s most ominous presence — a milieu that seems to be lurking just off screen at all times, pressing in at the edges of every frame even when it is not named. Aris evokes it not through speeches or headlines but through texture: shortages, interruptions, a traffic gridlock, a restaurant with no customers. He shows how politics enters kitchens, bedrooms, businesses, and the most intimate decisions.

Behind the film is a filmmaker who has been circling this material his whole career. A former management consultant, Aris first emerged as a co-creator of the Lebanese series Beirut, I Love You (2011–12), which he made with Akl when she was still an architecture student. The two have collaborated ever since — Aris edited her feature Costa Brava, Lebanon — and his own directing came through nonfiction: The Swing (2018) and Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano (2023), a portrait of Akl shooting Costa Brava in the aftermath of the 2020 Beirut blast. A Sad and Beautiful World premiered at Venice’s Giornate degli Autori, where it tied for the People’s Choice Award, and was Lebanon’s official submission for the 98th Academy Awards.

You can feel both Aris’ documentary and narrative instincts working in tandem. In one scene, the camera eavesdrops on an intimate discussion from behind. In another, a tragic death on a roadway is captured as if it were real footage. At other moments, the film becomes unabashedly cinematic, with gorgeously composed images and sequences of lyrical beauty. Aris indulges a few too many stylistic tendencies, but that is a minor complaint in a film so alive to possibility.

Several masterfully crafted images linger after the credits, but what remains most is the ache of accumulated almosts — the meetings postponed, the words unsaid, the years surrendered to circumstance. A Sad and Beautiful World earns its title. It understands that sadness is not always tragedy, and beauty is not always joy. Sometimes they are the same thing, seen from different distances.