Je Veux Vois (I Want to See)
(Joanna Hadjithoma, Khalil Joreige) Catherine Deneuve, Rabih Mroué
Running time: 69 minutes
Rating: 2/5

JE Veux Vois is a noble misfire. This cinematic experiment stars French legend Catherine Deneuve as herself and Lebanese actor Rabih Mroué. It's shot like a real-life documentary, though some of it is scripted.

They travel by car from Beirut to the south of Lebanon, which we come to see is left in ruins after the 2006 Israeli-Lebanon war. The camera watches them, Hitchcock-style, through the window.

Deneuve is her usual icy, inscrutable self: it's not unlike staring at a beautiful fridge-freezer; and Mroué withdraws into himself, upset at what lies before him. "I spent my childhood here and don't recognise anything," he says.

The filmmakers deliberately skirt the border between reality and fiction, though the places they visit are very much the real deal, marshalled by UN forces.

This is an intellectual exercise that offers little narrative pleasure, a cry for peace and progress designed to make us sit up and notice the destruction of a clearly despairing country through the eyes of Deneuve.