Room for a Man

Room for a Man, dir. Anthony Chidiac, 2017 Lebanon/USA, in French, Levantine Arabic, and Argentinian Spanish, with English subtitles. 👎🏼😴🙄
Sunday, June 17, 7:00 p.m. Roxie • U.S. PREMIERE

34 minutes into a 77-minute film is a
40-second scene where we see a
random guy’s abs, and for half of it he
has his shirt back on. Bait and switch!!

Are you looking for a lousy way to kill a couple of hours of your Sunday evening? Are you a fan of pointlessly self-indulgent navel-gazing documentaries? Then have I got the film for you! Filmmaker Anthony Chidiac turns the camera on the dog, the bird building a nest in the window, the Syrian tradesmen working in his mother’s apartment, and several of his relatives. He begins with the family tree, which seemed like a promising start: his family was quite important in early to mid-20th century Lebanon, plus he has family in Argentina. His family is Christian, like about a third of Lebanon. But that all moves to the background in favor of his mother being annoyed at the dog, his mother making kissy faces with the dog, and the Syrian refugees waxing philo­­soph­i­cal, plus a couple of scenes of his mother and uncle condemning ho­mo­sex­uality.

If you’re looking for the guy pulling his shirt up to show off his abs in the picture in the Frameline program, that’s at about 34 minutes into the show, it lasts about 40 seconds, and that is the only shot of anyone shirtless in the entire 77 minutes. One of the Syrians asks the filmmaker why he wants to make films, and his lack of a concrete answer is telling. NOT RECOMMENDED. Not offensive or violent or anything like that, just boring as all hell.

Incidentally, note that the interview clips often switch languages, sometimes more than once in a single sentence, so unless you’re fluent in all three, you will need the subtitles.