The Razor’s Edge (Jocelyne Saab, 1985)

The Razor’s Edge
(Jocelyne Saab, 1985, 102 min, France / Lebanon, Arabic and French with English subtitles, DCP)

New 4K Restoration

“I’ve invented places, as if by making a work of fiction about them, I could preserve them,” the Lebanese war correspondent–turned–filmmaker Jocelyne Saab said of her interest in fiction. Her 1985 drama The Razor’s Edge takes place during the Lebanese Civil War and centers on the bond formed between Karim (Jacques Weber), a fortysomething painter, and Samar (Hala Bassam), a teenager who grew up during the war (Juliet Berto has a small but striking role as Karim’s friend). Underneath the character-driven narrative is another story, that of a place. Saab started her career as a journalist working for French television and her reporter’s eye deftly captures the destruction of war-torn Beirut and the disparate but vibrant people wandering through its rubble and ruins. Screenwriter Gérard Brach (The Tenant, Identification of a Woman) worked on the final version of the script, and the result, juxtaposing the creation of art with violence, is an arresting meditation on humanity’s struggle in the face of unthinkable horror.

Restored in 4K in 2025 by Association Jocelyne Saab in collaboration with Cinémathèque suisse and La Cinémathèque québécoise at Cinémathèque suisse and Association Jocelyne Saab laboratories, from the positive preservation copy of the original cut presented at Cannes in 1985. Funding provided by Association Jocelyne Saab and Nessim Ricardou-Saab.

"[Saab's] films raise cinema to the fullness of its responsibilities." – Nicole Brenez

“[The Razor’s Edge], perhaps tragically, still has much to tell us about our present some 40 years on. As Karim says near the start of the film: ‘The dead have more to give us than we have to them.’” – In Review Online

“The rediscovery of The Razor’s Edge is a reminder that even the fragile, febrile medium of film can be more lasting than concrete, to say nothing of flesh. Much of the urban fabric that appears in the film has vanished—the rubble rebuilt and the buildings left standing later destroyed—and exists now only in the images painted by light on the screen.” – Mubi Notebook

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