A Sad and Beautiful World Film Review

Passion and heartbreak unfold in Lebanon as Nino and Yasmina fight to love each other despite tragedy in A Sad and Beautiful World.

From its opening sequence, which shows two children born in the same hospital as bombs fall outside and their lives unfolding in parallel through grainy home-video footage, it becomes clear this isn’t just a story of two people. It’s a portrait of a generation forced to grow up under the shadow of conflict, where even the most private romances are inseparable from the public chaos outside their doors.

At its core, though, the film thrives on intimacy. Mounia Akl and Hassan Akil  deliver a magnetic, deeply believable pairing. Their chemistry feels lived-in; the way they look at each other, the pauses in their conversations, the comfort and frustration between them all suggest a love story that has existed long before the film begins. Even in small gestures, you feel their shared history, as though the years of knowing each other had etched themselves into the way they move and speak. Watching them interact is simply engrossing, and it’s where the film shines brightest.

The screenplay is solid, balancing sweeping romance with the weight of Lebanon’s instability. There’s real charm here too, with moments of levity and warmth that soften the harsher truths. Yet, as much as the movie succeeds in evoking both sadness and beauty, it sometimes stumbles in tone. The shift from intimate, romantic scenes to sweeping depictions of socio-political turmoil can feel abrupt, almost as if two different films were colliding. This unevenness occasionally disrupts the emotional flow and breaks the sense of immersion in Nino and Yasmina’s world.

One of the most effective sequences in A Sad and Beautiful World comes early on, when Nino, now a waiter, crashes his car into an office belonging to Yasmina’s parents. The scene could have played as contrived coincidence, yet the film grounds it in the characters’ shared history; they went to the same school, grew up with the same backdrop of chaos, and seem destined to cross paths again and again. This sense of inevitability threads through the narrative, giving their love story both its grandeur and its tragedy.

Like its title suggests, A Sad and Beautiful World is exactly that: a film of contrasts. There’s so much tenderness in the way Nino and Yasmina try to build a life together, and yet there’s tragedy lurking in every corner, a reminder that survival often overshadows happiness. Even with its tonal missteps, the movie leaves a mark because it understands something essential about love: it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Sometimes the most powerful romances are the ones shaped by impossible circumstances.

A Sad and Beautiful World had its World Premiere at the Venice Film Festival on August 31, 2025, in the Giornate degli Autori strand.