Martyr

A haunting Lebanese drama that is more an emblematic parable about death and sanctification than a realistic story, Martyr concerns a young Beirut slacker named Hassane (Hanza Mekdad). Cycling through his neighborhood on the way to the beach, Hassane interacts with old mates he doesn’t hang out with anymore, as well as one or two well-wishers. Meeting up with a couple of similarly attitude-challenged buddies on a sunny shore, Hassane dives, swims, argues with his companions, and joins in a turf war with another group. But then this rudderless boy-man anti-hero drowns, and his body is taken up and transported via car to his parents, after which Hassane becomes in death the figure of esteem and purpose that eluded him in his curious idleness. But Martyr is much more about both formal traditions and the informal spontaneous rituals attached to communal grief and preparations for burial. Filmmaker Mazen Khaled blurs the border between the actual and the poetic, incorporating choreography, theatrical silences, and surreal tableaux to infuse moments of familial shock and (among friends) a homoerotic regard for the topography of Hassane’s cleansed flesh. There is a mesmerizing, almost trance-like quality even to ordinary passages—such as prolonged shots of Hassane’s friends wordlessly driving his corpse to his parents—that suggests the otherworldliness of chance events, and our inadequate reaction to them. Recommended. (T. Keogh)