{"id":555113,"date":"2026-07-23T03:31:17","date_gmt":"2026-07-23T03:31:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/555113\/"},"modified":"2026-07-23T03:31:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-23T03:31:17","slug":"a-sad-and-beautiful-world-review-a-poppy-romance-set-in-modern-beirut","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/555113\/","title":{"rendered":"A Sad and Beautiful World Review: A Poppy Romance Set in Modern Beirut"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the exact minute that baby Nino first came into this world, a rocket erupted through the walls of the Beirut<\/a> hospital where his mother had just given birth \u2014 it was 5:05 p.m. Down the hall, just a few seconds later, a different woman gave birth to a little girl named Yasmina, whose cries could hardly be heard over the sound of the explosions around her. That happened at 5:06 p.m.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cA Sad and Beautiful World<\/a>\u201d is acutely specific about the time, but withholds any concrete information about the date; amid the half-century of intermittent violence that has plagued Lebanon<\/a> since the start of its civil war in 1975, such incidents have become as cyclical and unspectacular as the seasons. What year is it when this decades-spanning love story begins? It doesn\u2019t matter, and writer\/director Cyril Aris (\u201cDancing on the Edge of a Volcano\u201d) deliberately confuses the point.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Richard<\/a> \"Gone\"<\/a> <\/p>\n

Voiceover narration tells us that a massacre took place that day, and the last stretch of the country\u2019s railroad was destroyed. But it also tells us that \u201con that day we sent a rocket to space,\u201d a reference accompanied by local news footage of the Lebanese Rocket Society launching its first suborbital test flight in the early 1960s. In a place whose people are forced to endure the same struggles as their parents (to paraphrase one of this film<\/a>\u2019s most aching laments), time will always be a flat circle. Joy will always be braided together with pain. Fireworks will always be mistaken for bombs. Home will always be a history to escape.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Per the contradiction of its title, \u201cA Sad and Beautiful World\u201d is constantly navigating between a love for Lebanon and the longing to leave it behind, a dialectic that Aris expresses by offsetting the gravity of his film\u2019s setting with the lightness of a pop romance. Imagine if \u201c(500) Days of Summer<\/a>\u201d was projected onto the pain of life during wartime \u2014 or vice versa \u2014\u00a0and you\u2019ll have a rough idea of how this movie frames the star-crossed relationship between its fated lovers. They remain bound to each other even as their imagined paths to happiness seem to lead in opposite directions.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Nino (Hasan Akil), who survived unspeakable loss as a child, has grown into a charismatic restaurateur whose Italian-flavored cuisine brings the world to Lebanon on a plate. He would never entertain the idea of leaving. Despite a less tragic upbringing that saw her family spend time abroad, the vibrant but cynical Yasmina (Mounia Akl) has grown bitter toward her birthplace and toward life itself. She intends to move to Germany as soon as she finishes her consultant work for the country\u2019s 2025 energy campaign. \u201cBoyfriend and girlfriend\u201d when they were seven years old (a relationship status they agreed upon over juice boxes), Nino and Yasmina literally crash back into each other\u2019s lives when he accidentally drives his car through the wall of her parents\u2019 living room.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s unclear if they remember each other, though Aris prefers to emphasize the extent to which they would even want to. For someone as nostalgic as Nino, this is the ultimate meet-cute (he seizes on the crash by inviting the girl\u2019s family to his restaurant for an intimate dinner). For Yasmina, who already has one foot in Europe, such a blast from the past feels like a strange cosmic snag.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But Anthony Sayhoun\u2019s plucky and shimmering score, which tempers \u201cAm\u00e9lie\u201d-esque synth whimsy with more traditional Arabic sounds, makes it obvious enough that magic is afoot. Meanwhile, extended flashbacks to Nino and Yasmina\u2019s childhood romance tug at the present with a palpably Western sense of emotionality (Aris cut the film with \u201cMoonlight\u201d co-editor Nat Sanders, who still knows how to hopscotch through time to maximum effect). Flirtatious bickering soon gives way to step-printed desire, and even a \u201cFriends\u201d-coded race home from the airport, as the dust and exposed rebar of wartorn Beirut fades into a flushed smear of neon lights, fragrant kitchens, and crystal blue seas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The threat is still there, suffused into the air like a memory, but for a time the choice between love and survival no longer feels mutually exclusive to Nino and Yasmina. Another child is born, and the cycle begins again. As the years speed forward, a new round of violence will force these characters into a final confrontation with the challenge of building a hopeless future together.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Unabashedly sentimental and committed to its heightened cuteness even as the earth threatens to rip apart below Nino and Yasmina\u2019s feet, \u201cA Sad and Beautiful World\u201d is at its best when Aris commits to the romanticism of its tone. Broad and dogmatic as its nonlinear approach can be \u2014 lyrical montages, styled to resemble home video footage, root Nino\u2019s twee nostalgia in such purely engineered feeling that Yasmina\u2019s natural cynicism can seem weirdly manufactured by comparison \u2014 the film maintains a sharp eye for the rhymes between past and present. The slackness of its final third, in which Nino and Yasmina are divided over where to raise their daughter,\u00a0is redeemed by Aris\u2019 enduring attention to how \u201cpolitics\u201d continue to intrude upon the everyday.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Whether the film\u2019s characters are wandering through the bones of a house they haven\u2019t built yet or sitting on the floor of an ultra-modern new apartment that might as well be in Dubai, Lebanon remains a third party in their love story. It\u2019s a love story that could never have been conceived anywhere else, and may not survive without a change of scenery.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Haunted by her feelings of unworthiness, Yasmina is suspicious of Nino\u2019s rose-colored glasses, and insists that, like Lebanon itself, he lives for a version of her that no longer exists. Nino, meanwhile, clings to his grandfather\u2019s fairy-tale vision of the country as a mythical island, where there are no bullets, no wars, and everyone has electricity at night. On its own, that recurring motif \u2014\u00a0visually literalized as a digital blue idyll in the middle of the ocean \u2014\u00a0seems mawkish, naive, and unworthy of a film that is otherwise so attuned to the heartache of leaving one\u2019s homeland, and to the quotidian extremes of living in this one. Despite the prescriptive nature of its framing, however, \u201cA Sad and Beautiful World\u201d ultimately wrestles with a question that neither of its characters will ever have the luxury of answering for themselves: Is it easier to love without hope, or to hope without love? Nino and Yasmina have always been bound together by that uncertainty, and the open-ended final moments of this movie leave us desperate to believe that they always will be.<\/p>\n

Grade: B-<\/p>\n

Watermelon Pictures<\/a> will release \u201cA Sad and Beautiful World\u201d in theaters on Friday, July 24.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the exact minute that baby Nino first came into this world, a rocket erupted through the walls…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":555114,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[251876,146,878,85,46,397,1530,251877],"class_list":["post-555113","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-a-sad-and-beautiful-world","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-watermelon-pictures"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555113","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=555113"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555113\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/555114"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=555113"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=555113"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=555113"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}