Reflections on the film “Taste of Cement”

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From a recent lesson on “film review writing”, I have learned that we can pay attention to the details of a movie to identify some of the filming techniques used by the director to enhance the message he wants to deliver. And that was what I was trying to do while watching “Taste of Cement”, a feature documentary about the lives of Syrian construction workers exiled in Beirut. The movie was the right choice for this first attempt of mine as there is not much that happens and there is even hardly any dialogue.

According to Mr. Ka Meng, our lecturer, sound effects contribute much to the impressiveness of the movie. I am well aware of the use of roaring sounds of drilling, often mingling with equally deafening sounds of bombings, to highlight the contrast between the two different scenes, the construction site on one hand and the war-torn region on the other. The contrast is meant to show a continuous cycle where structures are erected in one place and demolished in the other. The sounds are merged as to be seamless, which is bitterly sarcastic.

Another sound-related contrast also serves to engage the audience emotionally. While there is the thundering noise of construction work in the daytime, there is dead silence in a ramshackle living quarters just beneath the tower where the Syrian workers spend the night speechlessly, staring at television and telephone-screen images of the war raging on back in their homeland.

There is also a scene showing an undersea wreckage accompanied by soft sound of breathing. It could be the breathing of the cameraman. It could also be the young worker seeing the wreckage in his dream. This is a depiction of the workers’ disturbed state of mind, always haunted by memories of the horror scenes of war.

Where camera shots are concerned, I am much attracted by wide shots taking in the crane moving across the wide span of the blue Mediterranean Sea in the background. Often the sea is shown through a small square of light that is the open window occupying a tiny portion of the big span of dark taking up the entire screen. The young worker says that the window is the only means through which they seek connection with the outside world. He has mentioned more than once a picture of the sea he had seen in his childhood. The sea is thus a sign of his homesickness.

Close-ups of the eyes, or only one of them, are used from time to time. Every pair of eyes looks empty, showing the workers’ feeling of helplessness and hopelessness about life. And in the eye there is the reflection of the war scene. The footage from the mass bombings in Syria intercut with scenes of construction in Beirut is particularly horrifying. So whatever they are doing, they cannot rid themselves of their nightmares about war. 

This is a very sad movie, demonstrating war in its sad reality. The closing credits end with this remark: wishing you a life without war, which leaves a pain in the audience's heart long after we have left the cinema.