Jawaher and Rim are two girls in the Beqā Valley in the northeast of Lebanon: the first is a nurse, the other works in the fields. In search of a missing cousin, their brother Yaser accidentally runs over a boy from a rival family in the area. To compensate and ensure at least a truce, it is decided that the two be handed over to the sheikh of that family. Will that be enough? In the “transaction” no one seems to doubt the legitimacy of what happens, except Rim, who, however, can place her hopes only in fate.
Directorial debut of the Palestinian Rakan Mayasi, Yesterday I Didn’t Sleep shares with the cinema of , mentor and teacher of the filmmaker, a certain ruthless clarity of vision: the construction of the image relies on quite long sequences, in which the scarce dialogues tell less than the arrangement of bodies within the constraining 4:3 frame. In posture and essential movements, the characters convey beneath the surface the passions stifled by the rigidity of archaic behavioral models, with a frequent invocation of the divine to justify power dynamics in realities that are very human. The insomnia evoked by the title concerns not only the protagonists, but also the man Yaser, who mentions it when he confides to a friend that he is tormented by his cousin’s disappearance. Suggestive natural panoramas loom over the destinies of the characters, who move within a subsistence economy, further bogged down by the said behaviors. In this dynamic one would search in vain for Jawaher and Rim a rebellious dimension, at least as we can traditionally conceive it in Western culture.
The screenplay by Mayasi, who left a great deal of room for improvisation, relying on a cast of non-professionals, is dedicated to his grandmother. Although one also senses a dimension of denunciation, that aspect appears less powerful than the monument being built to a form of female dignity that might unsettled a public distant from those realities. Rim is undoubtedly the desperate “heroine” of the story (the quotation marks depend on the caveat we stated), but her sister Jawaher, while embracing her fate without challenging the status quo, demonstrates a stoic sense of responsibility toward the difficult dynamics of the community surrounding her. Family and homeland, though they become a cage, are never truly despised. As Rim says, the objective would simply be to exist: “I don’t want to stay in the village, but I don’t want to leave either. I simply want to walk.”
In the absence of rhetoric, with a sound design that favors ambient sound over bursts of music, used perfectly only where necessary, Yesterday I Didn’t Sleep keeps with a painfully suspended breath. It seems inevitable that for the two women any claim to an independent life, lived by their own will, is erased by a system that treats them as a kind of “organic currency”, not to mention the hypocrisy of an exchange not carried out in daylight. Only those who are braver can hope to figuratively raise their voices, through an escape, like the mythical cousin, who at least chose by her own will the disappearance to which Jawaher and Rim seem fated despite themselves.
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