The Mute E of a Listening Presence

Abstract

Formally intricate and politically subversive, the films of the Lebanese director Corine Shawi are composed of elliptically edited sequences, impassioned musical interludes, and sensual depictions of the female body. Her exploration of identity and female desire is interwoven with sights, sounds, and evocations of Lebanon’s present and past. Our exchange, which took place in the spring of 2019, focused primarily on Shawi’s documentary e muet (2013). Prior to e muet Shawi had made the long documentary Les femmes bonnes (2006), which follows the daily life of Doulika and other Sri Lankan domestic workers. She went on to make five further short documentaries: Daniela (2006), Oxygène (2007), Affinity (2007), Film of Welcome and Farewells (2007), and Je t’aime infiniment (directed with Nikolaj B. S. Larsen, 2010).1Affinity explores paintings by the Polish Art Deco artist Tamara de Lempicka, evoking the sensual energy of her depictions of women. Oxygène features Shawi’s family members, who express their anxiety about the taboo subject of her brother’s unexplained health condition. Her latest documentary feature, Perhaps What I Fear Does Not Exist (forthcoming), confronts Shawi’s past and present troubles. During the making of this film she spent two years living in different hospital rooms after her father became paraplegic.E muet, selected for the International Competition of the Marseille International Film Festival in 2013, features three women, Nanou Ghanem, Johanne Issa, and Rajwa Tohmé. Personal friends of the director, the women come from similar social backgrounds. Born during the Civil War (1975–90), at the time of filming they were all living in Beirut, where most of the film takes place.2 While music and song constitute a point of commonality between the women, the film reveals little about their lives aside from their personal relationships. Shot mainly in close-ups and extreme close-ups, e muet is composed of a series of interviews with these women, who reflect on their sexual encounters and discuss their attitudes toward love and intimacy.In the first filmed interview between Shawi and Rajwa, Rajwa explains how she is content being in several relationships at the same time. Later in the film she revisits her unease about monogamy after revealing that she has been living with someone for almost two years. She confesses that “everything has fallen apart,” but it remains deliberately unclear whether she is referring to the unstable situation in Lebanon or to her relationship. For Rajwa, living as part of a couple is strange and confusing: “I know how to live with seven, I know how to live alone, but I don’t know how to live as two.” The conversations with Nanou focus on the ephemerality of feeling and the various reasons why her recent relationship has ended. In one scene she ponders the inexplicable nature of her depressive mood while singing along to Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time.” Nanou speaks openly about her sexual desires and confesses that she is not at peace with herself and misses having her family close by. By contrast, Johanne remains silent throughout the film, expressing herself indirectly and nonverbally. When Shawi asks for her views on “life as a couple,” she simply smiles shyly.Interview scenes are interspersed with shots of the Beirut River, a nighttime carnival, the coastline, objects marked by bullet holes, and other distinctive landscape shots. Articulated in a mixture of Arabic and French, the women’s thoughts, feelings, and longings saturate the wider landscape, where traces of war linger.3 Through experimental techniques of fragmentation, ellipsis, and unexplained abstract images, Shawi fashions a female-only site for the expression of friendship, sexuality, and queer desire, allowing open conversations to take place on taboo topics, including sex, depression, and nonmonogamy.I am indebted to Corine Shawi for her generosity, openness, and passionate enthusiasm and for her willingness to partake in this exchange. I am very grateful to her for allowing me to share e muet with my students at the University of Bristol. I am also indebted to Evan Grégoire (Sciences Po Paris and l’École Normale Supérieure) for his invaluable assistance with the French version of the text and the English translation.