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The amenity that makes the family’s aerie most attractive is its good-size swimming pool. While working the small strip of land is hard, the water looks pretty good. Whatever sense of idyll exists is broken up when a faux-primitive statue of the country’s president (the crude artwork strapped to a flatbed and headed out of the city is the first image of the movie) is planted a few yards away from their land. Some workmen inform the family that this ridge of the mountainside is going to be a landfill. The trash that compelled the clan to leave Beirut is essentially following them. 

"Costa Brava, Lebanon" treats the effect of this upheaval in ways both unconventional and occasionally pat. The flirtation between Tala and one of the younger managers of the project, Tarek (François Nour), is wholly predictable, as is a health crisis experienced by a senior member of the household. The most compelling depiction of a personal dynamic is in the increasing tension between Walid and Soraya. Both share the same values but have increasingly distinct views on how to realize them. When the workmen recognize Soraya and tell her they liked her music, she’s flattered, and she allows herself to believe that she made a difference before she checked out of society.

Akl, making her directorial debut, takes resourceful advantage of her freedom as a filmmaker, creating some startling effects. After Soraya gets out a guitar and sings to her kids, the view outside the window starts a lateral move, to the right, as if Soraya is now on a train pulling from a station—a perfect metaphor for the character’s urge for going, as Joni Mitchell would put it. A vision of fire also startles. The film’s images entangle us with the characters, which makes its indeterminate ending a little more disappointing than it might have been. But this post-cataclysm habitat is worth paying a visit anyway. 

Now playing in select theaters.

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