The Pragmatist’s Romance: Cyril Aris on ‘A Sad and Beautiful World’
Recently, I've been feeling more and more confident that I never want to have kids. Perhaps it's the state of the world, the anxiousness of bringing another soul into something that feels like it keeps changing for the worse. Maybe, selfishly, I don't want to sacrifice my agency and have to consider another living being every time I make a decision. Maybe it's that I want to afford living in the Bay Area without selling my soul in its entirety. Or maybe it's that I want the time to go to the movie theater five times a week because I'm an insane person. Maybe it's that I teach third graders on Sundays, and despite how much I love them, they are candidly demonic in their behavior. Perhaps it's that I spent my whole life being told that the measure of success for a Muslim man is how well he provides for a family, and I've been vehemently opposed to those norms. No matter the reason, or probably combination of reasons, it's gotten to the point where I've had relationships end because I'm certain I don't want children within the next five years, if ever.
The first of those reasons is the only one I can't control. The West has perfected a trick where it applauds the art of the places it's tearing apart, hands trophies to the cinema of a region while paying for the bombs falling on it, and lectures the “Global South” on how to treat its own people while supplying the weapons to erase them. We call that hypocrisy when we're being generous. I am not feeling particularly generous today, so the word that I will use is “system,” and my existence as an American citizen makes me complicit in this particular system. Surviving in America means contributing to capitalism. I work a full-time corporate job, which means I spend half my life on a computer making stock go higher. When you sit with that perspective long enough, it makes you sour on the idea of having children.
A Sad and Beautiful World is Cyril Aris' first narrative feature, a love story that runs across three decades in Beirut. Nino and Yasmina meet as kids, lose each other, then reunite in their late twenties. The central question of the film is whether two people can talk themselves into building a family in a country that keeps coming apart around them. It premiered at Venice, won an audience award there, and is now Lebanon's entry for the Oscar. It’s a pretty fantastic film.
Yasmina is the more hesitant character of the two. She has done the math on her country and her life, and she comes out against having a child. She says so without flinching; she doesn't lie to herself, she sees things exactly as they are. I was on her side as soon as I met her. She’s a familiar archetype: the girlboss you can place from across the room, the breadwinner, the consultant with strong opinions. She's me (albeit a former consultant, thank God I left that life), if I were more impressive and also a fictional Lebanese woman (three descriptors which I am not).
Aris, the film's writer and director, connects with Yasmina more than Nino as well. "I was definitely on the side of Yasmina," he tells me, "agreeing with everything she was standing for and everything she was saying." And then: "Even though we identify with Yasmina, I think we're all striving to be a little more like Nino."
Nino, played by Hasan Akil, is the believer, and Aris built him out of the people he knows, men and women both, the ones who choose hope against the evidence. "In the Arab world, optimism is a choice," he says, "and it's a double-edged sword." The noble edge is the harder one, "to stay optimist, to keep going, to keep dreaming, to keep constructing." Akil lives close to the part. His brother left Lebanon, his friends left, and he stays, because he wants to build something there. Then the blade turns. "His optimism, which is exactly what Yasmina falls in love with, becomes exactly what pushes her away from him." Early on, she wants to see Beirut the way he sees it, and he pulls it off. Later, she tells him his way of thinking is a sickness and asks him to get it checked before their daughter catches it. "The qualities we fall in love with in our partner are exactly what end up pushing us away from them," he says, flatly, the only way anyone can say a thing that true.
The real romantic, it turns out, is the pragmatist. "Deep down, the real romantic in this relationship is Yasmina, much more than Nino," he says. "She's the one that can leave but chooses to come back." She makes the decisions, and she makes the most romantic choice in the movie. Her changing her mind is "a sign of maturity and openness," a romantic innocence buried by a childhood where families are "meant to disintegrate, just like the country." The pragmatist was the believer the whole time. She needed someone to dig it back up.
He brings up a word he's grown allergic to: resilience. "It's constantly romanticized and seen from a very exotic eye," he says, "like, oh, look at these Lebanese people, how resilient. But it's very much used against us." A people that adapts to anything can be made to endure anything. Optimism runs on the same fuel; he admires it and reaches for it, but some days, he wants to grab the optimists by the shoulders and tell them to stop, because their faith is part of what lets the country keep getting away with failing them. The film carries all of these sentiments without lecturing, partly because Aris lets it be funny and dreamy, with offbeat digressions and the odd burst of autotune in the score, and partly because of one line Yasmina says inside a montage: that she hates they're still living the same stories their parents did.
Aris thought, at first, that he was making a film about his own relationship with Lebanon: the love you feel for a place that keeps nudging you toward the door. The longer he wrote, the bigger the real subject got. "The central question of the film," he says, "was the question of bringing children into our world today," a world he calls cruel and unjust, and, in the Lebanese case, a place where, across three generations, "there hasn't been a single generation that hasn't been faced with a profound crisis or a violent war." Falling birth rates across the West and the Global South are the same question in other accents, mine included. Nino and Yasmina are its two poles, and for most of the runtime the film refuses to break the tie.
The tie breaks, mostly due to an act of God. Aris' firstborn, Luca, arrived while the film was still being made, and the arrival forced Aris to pick a side. Aris and his wife had built the entire shoot around the pregnancy, timing it to wrap four weeks before the due date, and Luca came four weeks early instead, on the last day of production. "He was born on the very last shot," Aris says, "which was a shot of the stars. It's all very magical, in the tone of the film." He had spent years building an argument about whether to bring a child into this world, and "the fact that he was born on the last day answered that question." Luca is the dedication at the end of A Sad and Beautiful World. The Arabic title translates to Stars of Hope and Pain.
Fatherhood hasn't softened what he knows about what he's handing down. His own parents brought him into the Civil War hoping he wouldn't live what they lived. He tells me about a friend who gave birth shortly before August 2020, who looked at her newborn and made the same promise, that the child would not live what she had lived, and whose home was destroyed in the port explosion when the baby was one, so that she had to explain a blast to a now-traumatized daughter. Three generations, not one of them spared. The hope gets handed down, and the disappointment gets handed down, and carrying both is most of the job.
He's raising Luca outside Lebanon, for now, splitting the year, the last five months of it spent in Beirut with Luca in a kindergarten hearing Arabic and French. He wants to give the kid every tool he can toward half of an identity, and he knows the rest is out of his hands. When I ask him about his anxieties, he reaches for Gibran: "Your children are not yours, they're the children of life. You don't own them. You're just the vessel, so the world carries them forward." He's watched the children of expats come out both ways. He mentions a brother and sister who were raised in the same house. The sister flies back every chance she gets, and the brother feels nothing in particular towards his home. "It doesn't necessarily have a very black-and-white answer," he says, and then apologizes for not having one, which is a blessing rather than a transgression.
Movies, Aris says, are witnesses to a time and a place, though not in the textbook sense. "It's much more of a visceral experience," he says, of what it was like "to be Lebanese, or to be a man and a woman, in that period of time in that specific place." When he watches the Lebanese films of the seventies and eighties, Jocelyne Saab and Maroun Bagdadi, he feels set down inside his parents' generation, inside their Beirut and its beauty and its wars. "This creates an intergenerational understanding that no communication can ever do," he says, "especially since we, as Middle Eastern men, you know how bad we are at communicating feelings." He hopes Luca watches the film in twenty years and meets him there, in the frame. I make a website where I try to leave enough of myself in the writing that someone could read all of it and know me, the same instinct from a much smaller chair.
His film is currently being celebrated loudly by the countries doing the most damage to his region, a fact that sits strangely on both of us. He draws a line first between people and governments, a distinction Arabs learn early, since ours rarely represent us. Then he names the rest. The West "has always given moral lessons to us," he says, on how to treat its people and our women and our minorities, "but then they are providing all the weapons to eradicate us, specifically Palestine, southern Lebanon." He doesn't think the answer is to write everyone off. "The role of cinema is to bridge that gap," he says. Palestinian films like The Voice of Hind Rajab, and the work coming out of distributors like Watermelon have the power to make a stranger feel "the butterfly effect of your vote, in the West, and the repercussions on the Global South." He thinks the shift is real and that it accelerated with Gaza, the livestreams, the footage the mainstream couldn't keep out of frame. He talks about it like a man who has to believe it, which is its own kind of evidence.
I came into A Sad and Beautiful World certain, and I'm leaving it less certain, which is the most a film can do to a person, and the precise thing Nino does to Yasmina. I still can't tell you when or even if I ever want kids. But I can tell you that the case against kids has a hole in it now in the shape of a film. Maybe, one day, I'll love someone enough for that idea to be that overruled. I asked Aris where all of this leaves him, with the country, the kid, the whole impossible equation. He told me to ask again in twenty years. In true Arab fashion, I told him “Inshallah.”