Marilyne Naaman. (Credit: Mohammad Yassine)
The meeting was scheduled for 9 p.m. on a Sunday evening. This one-hour interview was squeezed between two takes for a science-fiction film and the rehearsals for a concert that will be held at O Musical Theater on May 23 and 24.
Marilyne Naaman arrived on time, “fulfilled.” “[I'm] exhausted and overwhelmed,” she said. “The number you have dialed is no longer in service at the moment,” she said jokingly.
“I just want to have the time to appreciate everything that’s going on, to experience all the emotions and happiness, to digest this media pressure and responsibility,” she said in a more serious tone, before sitting down to catch her breath.
“And I don’t have it!”
Naaman flourishes and blossoms through different roles while remaining true to her freshness and passion for her profession. She performed at a “PJ party” in an informal concert in front of a small audience one evening. She played the role of Layla, a passionate wife and freedom-loving mother in Carlos Chahine’s film La nuit du verre d'eau. She also played the role of Farah in the Aa Amal series, which was a hit on MTV during the month of Ramadan.
“Passion and pressure go hand in hand,” she said.
Her performance on The Voice France in March 2023 has become a pleasant and memorable experience.
“It was, to my great surprise, a huge platform of freedom where I expressed myself as I wanted. And to even appear as I felt like it, and which enabled me to create this childhood world of mine.”
Long mistaken for a francophone artist and for a slightly shy teenager, she showed here disconcerting maturity and lucidity.
With one foot in adolescence, and the other in self-assured femininity, a touch of seriousness and humor, her leap forward was made with grace, elegance and simplicity. “Above all, sincerity.”
The roles she played over the past two years are fine illustrations of that. The role of Layla, for which she won the Best Actress at Amman International Film Festival, is an example. Layla (under the direction of Carlos Chahine) discovers pleasure after experiencing guilt in a society in the 1950s where daughters were married off early. There is also that of Farah, a young student, singer and daughter of a major TV star in an ultraconservative, patriarchal society in Aa Amal series, written by Nadine Jaber, directed by Rami Hanna and produced by Eagle Films.
“When I decide to take an acting role, there are several versions of myself that I reveal and exploit. When a role is well written and close to the heart, it feels so good to be someone else.”
Actress, singer and director Marilyne Naaman. (Credit: Mohammad Yassine)
Confessions
“This success came too quickly. I haven’t assimilated or digested it yet. It’s overwhelming, enormous,” said Naaman, who easily switched between the three languages she speaks.
“It’s a bit of a problem with my generation, this bad habit of mixing languages, my apologies,” she said. “But I don’t feel I belong to the generation of emoticons, iPhones, likes and social media. The generation of ephemeral experiences and appearances. I don’t find myself going with the flow.”
Instead, Naaman is part of this hurried, impatient, fast-moving 2.0 generation, she said,“I was, without wanting to be!”She is into nostalgia, into the passing of time that makes you want to watch it go by, to sing it, to stare at it.
The songs in her repertoire are often Lebanese classics. “Sometimes I’m very nostalgic, sometimes very committed. Sometimes I just want to sing,” she said.
An actress, singer, screenwriter, director “and a lot of other little things,” the young woman studied film and audiovisual studies at NDU. She then embarked in 2019 for Stuttgart, where she took an intensive workshop at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg in directing, writing and acting.
“That’s why,” she said, “When I sing, when I act, I can have a global vision of things.”
After the huge success of the Aa Amal series, that of her album, in which she performed songs written by Jad Obeid, quickly followed.
“There was a need for music, a need to fill the silences expressed in the series.” Tickets for the concert at O on May 23 and 24 were sold out within hours.
The shooting of a horror film produced by Abbout Productions and directed by Nadim Tabet provided her with a new experience in an emotionally rich year. “In this kind of shoot, you have to completely surrender yourself to the director, and that’s very new for me,” she said.
What can we wish for her in the future? “That it continues, that I stay grounded, that I stay in shape, that the door to creativity remains open. And that I can take my time,” she replied.
With her manager, accomplice and friend, director Lynn Tawile, she is preparing for what’s to come. First of all, there is the concert on May 23 and 24, in which she will certainly not be singing in her pajamas. Rather, she will bring out her femininity for the occasion, punctuated by multicolored tattoos, which she also knows how to play with.
But it was only when the spotlights had gone out, the photo shoot over and the interview over, that Naaman gave in to her sense of humor. It was only then that, to her great delight, she became “impulsive, emotional and not so politically correct” again.
This article was originally published in L'Orient-Le Jour. Translated by Joelle El Khoury.