TIFF Review: Private wars in “1982”

“The personal is political.”

That sentence has taken on a life of its own since the sixties, going from a slogan of second-wave feminism to a socio-cultural observation of the relationship between the public and the private in an ever-changing world. It’s as apt a slogan as any for what director Oualid Mouaness is doing in his thoughtful historical drama “1982”.

The vague generality of the film’s opening title belies the specificity and nuances of the narrative, which takes us back to the beginning of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 but turns its attention from very public cultural battles to a tiny story in a private school on the outskirts of Beirut. Mouaness’ interest in the personal is so stark that you may forget that “1982” is offering any real historical perspective.

A whimsical 11-year old, Wissam, is trying to work up the courage to tell a classmate that he has a crush on her. As the school term ends, with final exams in full-swing, the sensitive but not shy Wissam and his trusted sidekick work through the entanglements of childhood romance. Alongside this arc, his teacher, Yesmine, is trying to make sense of her brother’s role in Lebanon’s civil war and trying to make sense of her own tentative romance with another teacher. But these affairs of the heart are soon put on the back-burner as the gravity of the invasion of Lebanon hits the school and a banal day of classes turns into something a bit more stressful.

What’s immediately compelling about Mouaness’ work here is that he is trenchantly devoted to keeping his focus on the school-life so that “1982” only suggests the real-world implications affecting the characters around us. For much of its runtime, “1982” seems to exist uniformly as a coming-of-age adolescent romance rather than anything with a political context. Of course what better than impending war to act as crucible for a coming-of-age? Child actor Mohamad Dalli, as the impressionable Wissam, with his empathetic face, reticent but not opaque, keeps the childhood machinations from appearing maudlin.

Nadine Labaki in 1982 (Image courtesy of TIFF)

Threading it together is Nadine Labaki as the beleaguered Yesmine, whose role becomes essential to the denouement. Mouaness’ restrained tone means that the actors aren’t given much opportunity for histrionics or loudness. So,  Labaki pends much of the film’s first half reacting. To the students, to her dissident brother, to her bosses, but what’s key about these reactions is how immediately and consistently she creates the air of calm that the film will upend later on.

“1982” takes a turn for the unrealistic towards the end as it takes on the perspective of its adolescent quasi-hero Wissam. It’s a bit too on the nose–the way that a child’s machinations can come to take over the consciousness of the world it’s in–but, it doesn’t feel out of place. Mouaness doesn’t make an attempt to resolve any of the things at the film’s end and is not even particularly concerned with trying to nod to the future implications for the characters. It is, instead, as if we are given a very brief glimpse of these still lives. it doesn’t really matter what happens to them. Instead, Mouaness seems to be thoughtfully considering the ways that even in times of macro-sized conflicts and crisis, life goes on, unbent and broken, and petty and silly. It is, perhaps, not a revolutionary thesis but the film’s warmth and empathy is all the better for it. The private crisis at play in “1982” are the same private crises at play in so many communities around the world, the personal distress amidst the public chaos.