The Time That Remains

A quick history of Absurdistan, the country now known as Israel or Palestine (depending on which part of the wall you end up on). A personalised account starting from the Jewish take over of Palestine in 1948 and leading up to current day Israel. The movie however is less about the big picture, Palestinian-Israeli relations, but more about the very personal story of Elia Suleiman, his father - a resistance fighter - and mother.

The backdrop of history is used with great consequence, as Suleiman drives his tale through varying levels of absurdity and yet manages to deliver an emotionally gripping tale. Scenes of profound sadness, like the death of Elia's father, are preceded by short, but realistic, sketches of the ludicrous and nonsensical, like a tank following a man taking out the trash. However Suleiman delivers it with such class, that he never once dances with being a pastiche and remains a poignant, artistic picture throughout. Instead of making a dramatised account full of grief and sadness, Suleiman does the unthinkable with a devastating effect: laughs it all out.

Elia Suleiman is increasingly proving himself to be not only the most important Palestinian director, but also the best Israeli one as well. Talk about being absurd...

The Time That Remains is a cinematic marvel about war, family and love. Elia Suleiman with his brilliant comic timing accompanied with visually arresting portraits of Israel and yesteryear's Holyland, exposes his personality for the screen. An art house film with all the fixings especially history, cultural entanglement and humanity during a time of great duress. The story depicts a land that has passed us by but memories remain in dialogue, tradition and repetition. A true masterpiece. X Compares to the scope and depth and landscape of great cinema like Roma, the humor of Dr. Strangelove and the ingenious of the Coen Brothers.

Sometimes, life throws at us things that over the years become too big to comprehend. Such are natural disasters, pandemic diseases, nuclear explosions, and wars.

In his movie, released in 2009, Elia Suleiman sets on a journey to explore the genre of black comedy, so as to reveal to us the secret of coping with a tragedy of which the magnitude is overwhelming.

It is the nature of human mind to always look for some form of normality, maybe a little static, but nevertheless, a feeling that your bases are covered, your life has a purpose and your entire existence in a certain place and at a certain time is not meaningless. This is what we, humans, do when gun battles, tanks and security surges are suddenly a persistent part of the daily routine. And this is exactly the focus of The Time That Remains. Half a century of tragedy is squeezed into an hour and a half of a laconic and precisely targeted shock therapy.

Despite its smoothness and an accurately placed hint of suspense, this movie doesn't truly give you a moment of rest. There's no wallowing in self-pity here, no destructive mind blowing imagery; even the garden of executions is so well carved into the texture of the surrounding neighborhood that it appears natural despite your mind telling you that what you are looking at is a yelling contradiction to what is humanly acceptable.

There's also no conflict, in a traditional sense of the word, around which the story would evolve. All there is is a deceptively distanced and only seemingly uninvolved bitterly comic narration about generations of painful struggle to remain human in a filled with nonsense reality, where even a direct participant finds himself merely an observer, trying to just be.

The movie strikes as grotesque, largely satirical, very reflective and detailed. This effect doesn't wear off till the very last scene.

When telling the truth becomes a taboo, the sensationalism of this movie is found in the peculiar way of drawing attention to what should not be discussed, because the subject makes us uncomfortable.

Elia Suleiman resorts to various means offered by cinematography in order to break the unbreakable, to jump over the wall.

There are no loud graphic scenes in this movie, nothing at all that an adult cannot handle; yet, it is heavily loaded with incredible emotions that run deep in the film's canvas, leaving you gulp for air at times.

When deciding whether or not to watch this movie, don't hesitate. Just watch. And prepare lots of tissues, even if you are known for having a thick skin.

This film, like most Elia Suleiman films, uses real time, absurdity, symbolism and scenes from Suleiman's life, at the same time portraying history and current events. As typical of Suleiman it is also a very personal film, the most personal of the ones I've seen (Divine Intervention, Chronicle of a Disappearance). It is a reminiscence of his family from the time of 1948, when the state of Israel was created on the land called Palestine, to the present day.

The film covers events including the war of 1948, the death of Nasser, the resistance against Israeli occupation, and the deterioration of Palestinian society in recent times. It is filled with Suleiman's typical tragicomic scenes of interaction between Israelis and Palestinians. It is a very sad film, however, the humor that runs through the film, and the suspense that is created by filming in real time, keep the film engaging even though like Suleiman's other films the pace is somewhat slow.

This may very well be the first film that I have watched by a Palestinian filmmaker, and it was a good one. It deals quite a bit with the oppression of the Palestinian Arabs by Israeli authorities over the years, beginning with the takeover of Palestinian territory in 1948. This follows the life of a family in Nazareth. Much of the story is told quietly and at a distance; the dialogue is minimal. That does not mean this is grim or didactic, not at all. Regular helpings of physical, stage comedy lighten what is a serious story. There are several things that went on that I did not understand - the behavior of certain characters was mystifying, and why do they sometimes speak in English? But that did not ruin things - this is a fine film overall.