Under The Concrete

Dive to just 10m deep and the pressure doubles compared to that on the surface - and as you dip further into Roy Arida's debut feature, he ensures you feel the weight of all the forces that are pressing on Alain (Alain Najm) who is, as he puts it, "not living the dream". Alain knows all about the underwater pressure, as alongside his sales day job, he's a scuba coach, but Beirut, Lebanon, is also suffering from plenty of surface tensions, with the radio bringing news of a stream of suicide bombings.

Arida wants us to see - and just as importantly, hear - the world as Alain does, to go beyond character study into character immersion. His Beirut is a place filled with commotion, from the constant sound of high-rise building work to traffic so thick you can almost smell the exhaust fumes. Underwater is a pretty noisy environment too, with breath sounds magnified so that one of the few quiet spaces, providing the radio is silenced, the interior of Alain's car - in a mark of thoughtful framing by Arida and his cinematographer Jacques Girault, in one such moment, we see the reflection of a palm tree wafting gently on the wind on the driver's window as he gazes out. The camerawork is spot-on throughout, finding contrast from above and below the waves and highlighting the way perception can be altered in a heartbeat in a moment when we see the serene blue of a swimming pool switch to murk as the lights go out.

He may not be advertising it but there's a streak of nihilism to what Alain decides to do next, which is to attempt to break the world diving record, something which is risky but which Alain insists is no more so than his friend's penchant for speeding about the place on motorbikes. The fact that he is doing it because it's there to be done rather than for any fully fledged sense of achievement or recognition also speaks to the disaffection of younger adults more widely.

Arida stokes the tension through contrast, letting the look of concern on the face of Alain's French girlfriend Nathalie (Nathalie Japiot) and his co-divers tell us all we need to know about the risks. His first feature is big on mood, encouraging us to enter Alain's headspace as he makes his dives, to try to fathom what he is also trying to fathom about the inadequacies in his life.

The underwater camerawork by Arthur Lauters is used judiciously, not just to pull the narrative taut but also to give us a sense of what, aside from risk, draws Alain to the environment. It's a place where he finds the sweet spot of being in control and not and where moments of awe - including a beautifully captured piece of nature photography involving a large ray - are possible.

Under The Concrete lasts just 71 minutes but nothing about it feels hurried, Arida is also careful to break any sort of rhythm or monotony, so that there's a constant sense of being unsettled or restless, a feeling bolstered by Karim Douadi's score which, though rhythmic, also has jazzy flourishes that arrive unexpectedly and fuel the tension further.