‘Sirens’: Film Review | Sundance 2022

More people need to watch Nida Manzoor’s Peacock comedy We Are Lady Parts so that it’s entirely clear that when I say that Rita Baghdadi’s Sundance documentary Sirens is basically a nonfiction version of We Are Lady Parts, it’s very high praise.

It means that Sirens is a likable crowdpleaser about the intersection of gender, sexuality and aggressively loud music in a culture that isn’t always open to deviations from the norm. And if my major complaint about We Are Lady Parts was that it was too short at only six half-hour episodes, I have similar reservations about Sirens, which runs only 78 minutes and feels a bit abrupt and choppy in places. But it’s a complaint born more of enjoyment than anything else.

Baghdadi’s film, in competition at Sundance, is set primarily in and around Beirut and centers on Lilas and Shery, co-founders and guitarists for the thrash metal band Slave to Sirens. Lilas and Shery have a fruitful creative partnership, but a volatile friendship complicated by a previous romance. The uniqueness of Slave to Sirens’ in-your-face style in a country with shifting views of in-your-face women has earned them some press attention and even an appearance at the Glastonbury Festival in the UK. Will Slave to Sirens be able to break out before they break up?

All of this, of course, is set against the backdrop of a country in ongoing political and societal flux. Lilas and Shery met at a protest and at least one of their regular fights takes place as youths march in the street behind them. Plus, Baghdadi was filming in 2020 and the aftermath of the Port of Beirut explosion is woven into the second half of the documentary.

Oddly, COVID-19 isn’t mentioned at all — some people in the background of some shots are wearing masks, but… they might have been doing so anyway — and it would be my hunch that the pandemic was directly responsible for some of the gaps in Baghdadi’s filming and in the ebb and flow of the band’s journey. But I’m only surmising this based on contextual detective work — the lack of a Glastonbury Festival in 2020 and 2021 and then the Beirut explosion in Fall 2020 — rather than a textual explanation.

As it stands, Sirens is trying to be both a fairly linear and formally conventional documentary — zero criticism there — in which you may frequently find yourself asking, “But what about…” or “What happened to…” or “How did we get to…” questions before an ending that comes across more like a surrender than a conclusion.

These things mostly bothered me because Sirens is so generally entertaining and interesting.

Lilas, who lives with her mother and younger brother and teaches music by day (or did until it stops being mentioned, again possibly because of COVID), is intense and funny and talented. At some point, she has a new girlfriend, who has a not-coincidental resemblance to Shery.

Shery is less open about her personal and professional life, but she’s clearly a dynamite musician, and the scenes with the entire band together are a blast. In concert, they unapologetically rock, and the Glastonbury sequence, while brief, is a standout. And when the band is just casually noodling and working on songs together, there’s some of that same inventive energy that folks dug in Peter Jackson’s recent Beatles documentary.

The documentary’s focus is more on the universal than the unique, which is probably progressive in its own way. Lebanon is a secular, Muslim-majority country, but religion is never really discussed in the documentary. It’s a country that’s more open to LGBTQ rights than many in the region — “Homophobia is a Crime” scrawled in graffiti is one of the first images in the documentary — which doesn’t mean that there aren’t laws that could make life difficult for our characters, though that’s referenced to a minimum.

Lilas and Shery both speak nearly flawless English and switch fluidly between that and Arabic. The goal, for both the documentary and for Slave to Sirens, is accessibility, offering a perspective that’s wildly different from what TV and movies produced in the West tend to depict when it comes to Lebanon.

Baghdadi, who serves as her own cinematographer, seeks out the beauty around Beirut, filming in the hills and among the not-proverbial cedars of Lebanon, capturing conversations that just happen to take place on the beach as the sun is hitting the Mediterranean just right. The city’s unique architecture is accentuated even when pillars of menacing smoke are rising in the background.

Sirens has the feeling of a festival audience favorite and, with big-name executive producers including Natasha Lyonne, Maya Rudolph and former Netflix bigwig Cindy Holland, it has the feeling of a movie that could get some real visibility. And it deserves to. Wanting more is a criticism, but it’s a luxury criticism. This documentary builds a world you want to explore further.