A Palestinian filmmaker is fated to have a single looming subject, but the award-winning director Elia Suleiman has taken a more eccentric path than most.
Two of his features have received healthy arthouse distribution: “Chronicle of a Disappearance” (1996), an inscrutable deadpan comedy of sorts (in which the disappearance, it is implied, is of the Palestinian people); and “Divine Intervention” (2002), an occasionally surreal series of scenes about Palestinians living in Israel.
“The Time That Remains” is Suleiman’s newest, and it is more normal than his previous pictures. And yet, even though it is easier to understand than those movies, it is somehow less intriguing.
Suleiman has said that the film’s central family reflects his own. Beginning in 1948, the year Israel was founded, the movie depicts the stages of life for an Arab family in Nazareth, a city that is now part of the state of Israel.
The head of the household is a dashing figure who makes some effort to get involved in an anti-Israeli resistance movement. As the years go by, he and his wife will have a son, Elia, who we understand to be the surrogate for the director (in the latter stages of the movie, which bring the chronology to the present day, he is in fact played by Elia Suleiman).
Suleiman’s style is that of a silent-film comedian; his movies always have slow visual jokes that play out in perfect deadpan. Those moments are still present in “The Time That Remains,” and they form some of its best sequences: the repeated sight of two men fishing at night, for instance, or the amazing spectacle of a tank training its gun on a man crossing the street to take his garbage to the dumpster.
But this film is also made up of domestic scenes and coming-of-age conventions, and here Suleiman’s hostility for Israel becomes so furious it tips his movie out of its delicate balance. Perhaps that’s what he wanted: to break through his somewhat academic style and let the anger out.
The problem is, while that anger is authentic, it blacks out some of the light that Suleiman would presumably want to bring to the situation. There’s no “bigger picture” here, just a pre-ordained view repeated over and over, which inevitably becomes less interesting as it goes along.
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