Jocelyne Saab became a journalist because she couldn’t go to film school and wanted to create images. It was when she started working for French television that she picked up a camera, after a brief stint at Télé-Liban, where she produced two reports that have now disappeared. In the early 1970s, her interest in fiction led her to write screenplays, and one story in particular kept her busy: that of Beirut, and of life despite the war. The script for Ghazl el-banat went through several versions and the filmmaker teamed up with a Canadian production company. Saab finally enlisted the services of French screenwriter Gérard Brach for the final version. Her first location scouting photos were taken in her house, the same one that appears burnt down in one of her most poignant documentaries, Beirut My City (1982). Having planned to shoot the film as early as 1978, learning alongside Farouk Beloufa on the set of Nahla (1979) and with Volker Schlöndorff on the set of The Circle of Deceit (1981), Saab finally had to return to Beirut, having stopped documenting the war, to tell a story of platonic love between a young refugee from southern Lebanon and a bourgeois painter depressed by the political situation. The film traverses spaces that have now disappeared, takes us into some of Beirut’s most sumptuous palaces, and tells us about the war from the point of view of those who inhabit it. Saab convinced French actors Jacques Weber and Juliet Berto to take part in the adventure. The film was shown at the Cannes Directors’ Fortnight in 1985 under the title L’Adolescente, sucre d’amour (The Razor’s Edge). It was reedited for its brief theatrical release in 1988, under the title A Suspended Life: for lack of money, Saab made the cuts to the distribution copy. All the prints we’ve found are different from one another. At the end of her life, Jocelyne Saab mourned her original version, which she felt was more “naive but sincere”. This restoration was carried out in Beirut from the 35mm positive conservation print belonging to the Canadian production company that supported the film, held at the Cinémathèque québécoise and digitised by the Cinémathèque suisse.

Mathilde Rouxel