Apparently Tranquil

“I dream of your grandpa every night and if not, every other day,” Fatima el Ghoul tells her favorite grandson. “I see him in front of me passing by. I think the dead don’t speak you see them in your dreams but they don’t speak to you.” As she speaks in voiceover, Fatima—better known as Teta to her family—sits on her sofa and sips water from a glass. “Sometimes I see him sitting, sometimes sick, other times in his suit when he was young. A glimpse. I’m always reminded of him. He never leaves my thoughts.”

Here the camera in Teta, Alf Marra (Grandma, A Thousand Times) changes from a wide shot of Teta to a closer focus. As she describes the permanence of her mind, the camera moves away from the young woman who is standing on Teta’s balcony to her left, so she is no longer visible, and turns to Teta’s face, briefly contemplative, and then tilting down onto her formidable belly and her hands, not quite at rest in her lap.

Laid alongside Teta’s remembering, this evocative shift in image is typical of the film’s strategy, its focus on the fluidity of time and memory. She introduces herself in the film by her own name and then, as the “wife of Mahmoud Rashidi,” still. As she looks back, prompted by her grandson, the filmmaker Mahmoud Kaabour, Teta reveals as well her frustrations with the present and her hopes for the future. As it happens, he provides a particular sort of sounding board, for he resembles her much-missed husband. “Do I look like him?” Mahmoud asks, seated on the sofa next to her and knowing the answer before she speaks. “Yes, you really do. I’m not telling you this out of courtesy.” He smiles. The frame cuts to another scene, as Mahmoud is posed in front of his grandfather’s portrait. The light is dim as a woman moves his chin so he mirrors the picture behind him, and then, a couple of shots later, the light comes on.

The play of light and shadow is only one of the ways that Teta, Alf Marra—which opens 2 December at New YOrk’s IFC Center—explores the relationship between perception and projection, recollection and forgetting. As Teta recalls, Mahmoud reenacts, and as she cherishes, he uses his film to illustrate. For as much as Teta sees her Mahmoud in dreams, she also sees her own life in transition. She doesn’t leave her apartment much anymore, she explains, the apartment in Beirut where she’s lived for decades. That doesn’t mean she doesn’t interact with the street just a couple of stories below: she sits daily on her balcony and watches.

As the frame cuts among multiple angles on the balcony, from below and straight one, close through the curtains and far from Teta’s gaze, she says, “I sit on the balcony, people coming and going, chatting, kids playing football, one of them on his bike. I enjoy it, it’s how I pass my time.” The details reveal that she watches carefully, even as she laments her illiteracy. Her parents didn’t send her to school, she says, as she had chores at home. “It breaks my heart that I can’t read or write” she says now, “But I can do everything else.”

Namely, she raised six children (“and raised them well”), and listened as her husband played music in his bedroom. Photos suggest he played music on stage too, that he took great care with his appearance (“He used to spend two hours in front of the mirror until his hair was perfectly done”). Now, without him, Teta observes her neighborhood, calls out to her neighbors across the way, and buys potatoes or coal from street vendors by way of a bucket she lowers on a rope. She’s lonely too, indicated as she lays on her bed alone and, she says, wonders “when and how I will die.” She rises and walks, the camera close on her hip and back. “I’m not afraid,” she says, but still, as she makes her way through a darkened hallway, she observes, “A house is ugly when empty.” Her back fills the frame as she walks, slowly.

To get through her days, she drinks coffee, prepares meals, and takes occasional meds. Looking through a box of pills, she shows Mahmoud her sleeping pills, her antidepressants, and also a wrapper from a pack of Oreos she hopes her live-in caretaker Hasna will find for her again: “I like this one,” she confides, “yummy chocolate and biscuits.” 

Along with this bit of medicinal magic, she also smokes Arguileh. Her doctor has suggested she stop. The camera stands back across the kitchen as she cleans the pipe. Mahmoud asks how long she’s been smoking, and she answers, “Fifty years now, the last two years more than usual.” Her son Hamdillah comes to visit and notes that even if she sometimes loses track of time while smoking (“Why did you call me two days ago and tell me you were talking to dad?”), the quiet it offers her seems worth that exchange. “Between us,” he says, leaning in toward the camera, “I like her smoking. The tranquility that we’ve lost, the stability that we’ve lost, it’s all there in that scene. It’s there even if it’s transient.” The image cuts from Hamdillah to a low angle on Teta on her sofa, smoking, still and wide and apparently tranquil.

Her transportation on her sofa is at once metaphorical and, with help from the film, oddly literal. She and Mahmoud sit together, discussing sisters and cousins who appear in the window frame behind them. As they begin to talk about Mahmoud’s father, Teta’s son, she asks, “Have they met him yet?” No, he says, he hasn’t yet introduced his father to his film’s audience. “Let me see if I have a picture of him somewhere,” she says, just before the window frame behind the sofa changes to show him in a suit, smiling and sharp. “Tell me about him, your older son, Mohammad,” urges Mahmoud. He’s like his own father, she says, “He likes to take care of his looks,” to keep his hair styled, to preserve the fiction of his youth. “Ask his age, he would say 30 or 35. He does not want to grow old.”

This is the focus of Teta, Alf Marra, how Teta grows old, how her family sees her and can’t quite imagine life without her. “Teta is holding the family together,” says one grandson, “I’m afraid if she parts, the bonds will weaken.” The film is a loving portrait of her process, at once funny and reverent, amiable and acute. From her balcony, Teta surveys her neighborhood and looks back on her experience. And still, as detailed and sensitive as the film may be, she sees more than it can show.