The Razor's Edge

“I’ve invented places, as if by making a work of fiction about them, I could preserve them,” the Lebanese war correspondent–turned–filmmaker Jocelyne Saab said of her interest in fiction. Her 1985 drama The Razor’s Edge takes place during the Lebanese Civil War and centers on the bond formed between Karim (Jacques Weber), a fortysomething painter, and Samar (Hala Bassam), a teenager who grew up during the war (Juliet Berto has a small but striking role as Karim’s friend). Underneath the character-driven narrative is another story, that of a place. Saab started her career as a journalist working for French television and her reporter’s eye deftly captures the destruction of war-torn Beirut and the disparate but vibrant people wandering through its rubble and ruins. Screenwriter Gérard Brach (The Tenant, Identification of a Woman) worked on the final version of the script, and the result, juxtaposing the creation of art with violence,…