"Like you, I have forgotten/ Why deny the obvious need to remember?/ Listen to me once more,/ it will start back again."-Hiroshima mon amour (Kan ya makan Beirut). In the spirit of early Godard and the European New Wave, this is Jocelyne Saab's Two or Three Things I Know About Beirut. Two young women, Yasmine and Leila, search out this complex city through its repository of memory-cinema. They find this in the person of one Monsieur Farouk, an old movie connoisseur. The two women enter, Zelig-like, into his pictures and their own, their styles changing decade by decade along with the flics. Saab delights in ironies such as Godard's leading lady Anna Karina playing Scheherazade in a French epic, and contradiction, as we move from sci-fi to the city's bombed-out heart of today. Beirut, the "jewel of the Near East," has been a magical mystical tourist landscape for local schlock as well as James Bondian spy thrillers from the West, and Saab indulges them all. As cinema toys with reality, so this film toys with cinema, taking us full circle back to reality.