Stone Safety

The film reflects the London-born, Gotham-educated Durra’s own international background and influences, featuring characters from a wide range of ethnicities and languages, all with distinctive sensibilities and attitudes that defy stereotype. At the same time, Durra’s subtle but unmistakably sarcastic sense of humor and taste shows she has no desire to cast her intentionally meandering tale as one urging cultural “understanding.”For starters, as Durra introduces Asya (Elodie Bouchez), she’s viewed in a pixilated video image dressed in a mock Arab headdress and nude from the torso down, modeling for her own conceptual work deconstructing Western views of the Arab “other.” The blend of po-mo irony and feminist subversion is instantly in your face, setting a tone the film rigorously maintains.Asya is a New York artist t5 fat burners on the rise, surrounded by a group of friends and relatives being pulled in all sorts of emotional directions. Tatiana (a consistently amusing Karolina Muller) pouts that her fiance has gotten cold feet just before her wedding, and the sight of her despairing in her Oscar de la Renta gown is the film’s iconic image of this world of privilege and sadness.This tension is highest when Asya learns during a lengthy all-night, bar-hopping party that her pal Faisal is being renditioned by the U.S. on charges of suspected terrorism. Asya’s life may include a parade of hip cognoscenti, young cosmopolitans, stretch limos, poodles and large studio lofts, but her concern for Faisal amid the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah attacks in Lebanon places the good life in a context that neither she nor those in her circle can ever quite reconcile.

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