DO YOU LOVE ME – Review by Sarah Ward
Is it possible to paint a definitive portrait of any country, city, chapter of the past or even moment? Do You Love Me has an answer, and also is an answer. The remarkable debut feature from Lana Daher, who co-writes with editor Qutaiba Barhamji (an alum of Kaouther Ben Hania’s Four Daughters and The Voice of Hind Rajab), this essayistic documentary springs from a void: as the film’s very first line of opening text advises viewers, contemporary history is not taught in schools in Lebanon. To explore and chronicle the nation’s recent experiences, then, Daher and Barhamji splice together media from over 20,000 sources, such as movies, fellow docos, TV, music, podcasts, publications, photographs, news footage, found footage and home videos. Their resulting collage weaves and sways through snippets from its Beirut-focused treasure trove, and between years, like a dance — that act of physical expression that, every second that it takes place, conveys shapes, forms, movements and emotions with immediacy and passion yet is always and inescapably subjective.
Do You Love Me gives voice to the truth, and more than once, that any record of history is only as good as the stories immortalised. It verbally recognises that every account is just that, an account, and that the events, viewpoints and other details left unpreserved are vast. Daher can’t fight or change this reality. She also can’t assemble every slice of Lebanon’s past in totality. Her film can respond to these facts, though. With its mosaic of many faces, Do You Love Me amasses a wealth of sights and sounds that offer as complete and comprehensive a picture of Beirut life over the last seven decades as one director, inherently attending to her task from one perspective — or two, courtesy of co-scribe Barhamji — is able to. Openly and eagerly reliant upon the materials of others, the pair synthesises, then builds from and with, the vantages of others.
This is how Do You Love Me flows: in groups of images and scenes matched in setting, action, theme or a combination of each, that navigate daily existence in Lebanon. Dialogue, voiceover and music connect each batch, and help them segue into the next, sometimes with the aid of the written word. People stare beyond the coast; “in this city, all our memories melt into the sea,” viewers are told. Firearms are grasped, cars and buses drive, explosives decimate and Beirut’s residents are left to survey the aftermath. Conversations ponder how much Lebanon does or doesn’t change, alongside its religious makeup and divisions. One song gets blatant about the dispirited, at best, atmosphere of 2020; others reflect upon emigrating abroad, or coping with staying by living like you’re on vacation. Weddings, airstrikes, families, memorials to the lost and dead, tourists seeking the scars of war, destroyed museums, singing children, censored newspapers: all feature. Devastation is spied frequently. Because life endures — “and the beat goes on and on,” one tune notes — Do You Love Me also has more than a little time for dancing.
As proves evident from mere minutes in, Daher’s film is stunningly expansive, and alive with the texture and variety of collective memories. Shouting welcomely and loudly through Barhamji’s deft cutting is the sensation of plunging into a communal snapshot, one person constantly giving way to another (and one corner of Beirut, too, to the next) in the expertly chosen compilation of footage. Do You Love Me sees multitudes over and over, including in the conflicts waged within and invasions made upon Lebanon. The same is accurate along the scale from suffering to courage and even joy. As asserted via that canny, always-fluid editing, Daher and Barhamji revel in contrasts both unavoidable and purposeful, as well as occasionally playful; although every chronicle of history has gaps, none can be found in this documentary’s sheer effort.
For all of the cumulative feeling that gives Do You Love Me its energy — the feeling, to perhaps be more accurate, that the film accumulates in every way that it can — it nonetheless remains aware that, because all gazes back in time are, it is also deeply personal. Constructed from fragments, this is indeed Daher and her team’s definitive portrait of Lebanon, but a project of this intent and scope, not to mention emotion and power, can still never be, capture, say or enshrine absolutely everything. What Do You Love Me does cover and utter, though, is truly extensive — and all the more affecting for acknowledging the limitations of its task, and for wholeheartedly embracing the impossibility of ever narrowing the past down to a single interpretation.
It isn’t an easy or minor feat to make a movie that is as wide-ranging as it is intimate, which Daher notches up unforgettably. Equally rare, as Do You Love Me also achieves: that watching this impressively complex film, which so cleverly wrestles with the restrictions of remembering and sharing history — especially while actively redressing a lack of such record and knowledge for Lebanon — is as heartbreaking as it is celebratory, and as reflective as it is brimming with resistance.
