The Home That Remains

Leonard Quart: Time That Remains

THE TIME that Remains is the third in a loosely shaped trilogy of films (Chronicle of a Disappearance and the semi-surrealist Divine Intervention are the others) made by Elia Suleiman about the Palestinian people and their relationship with the state of Israel.

The film, divided into four episodes that span 1948 to the present, operates on a number of levels. On one level—the most moving one—it’s an elliptic, stylized tale of the director’s own family in Nazareth, focusing especially on his father Faud (Saleh Bakri, whose memoirs inspired the first two-thirds of the film). Faud is a movie-star handsome, chain-smoking metal worker who uses his lathe to make guns for the Palestinian resistance during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. If The Time that Remains has a hero, it’s the lanky Faud, who is stoical, courageous, and a nationalist of the Left. But as the years pass, he becomes frailer and detached from politics, though he remains a man of almost silent grace.

Suleiman clearly loved his parents. He poignantly depicts the family in warm, intimate moments—almost totally through images, avoiding explanatory dialogue or attempts to capture their inner lives. In one beautifully composed scene, he repeatedly shows his depressed elderly mother quietly drinking coffee as she looks at a photo of her dead husband on her apartment balcony—contemplating a past of personal loss and a nonexistent future. She evens averts her gaze from the sky lit up with beautiful fireworks, for there is nothing left to take pleasure in.

The Time that Remains is also a political film, with the 1948 War seen from the Palestinian point of view—without any attempt to suggest that both sides, as in almost all wars, committed abuses. In its opening scenes the film predictably portrays the Israeli army behaving brutally (but in a credible and not caricatured fashion) toward Faud, who is bound, blindfolded, and subjected to a mock execution. The rest of the film is suffused with his sense of despair at living in a country ruled by those who have vanquished and dispossessed him and his fellow Palestinians. Suleiman avoids indulging in angry polemics against the Israelis or romanticizing the Palestinians, and he doesn’t provide a developed political critique—he doesn’t want to impart a “history lesson.” But the film conveys intense emotional resistance to the status quo in Israel. Silence is the prime trait of some of his characters, including himself, but it is used as a means of repudiating what is. In Suleiman’s words, silence “is wonderfully subversive, it makes you question things.” And “it is the spectator’s privilege to put the silence into words, to take part in the creation of the image.“ For example, when an IDF patrol passes Faud and a neighbor fishing, and questions them about why they are there, they eloquently respond monosyllabically or not at all—an implicit denial of the power of the Israeli state.

Finally, Suleiman has made a dryly comic film using sight gags that suggest how ridiculous much of our public and private lives can be. Sometimes one feels the director strain for effect. He repeats a vignette with his family’s depressed neighbor, who gets drunk then threatens to set himself on fire, leading Faud to calmly take the matches away from him and gently shepherd him inside. While repetition is one of Suleiman’s motifs, this scene gains nothing from it. The film is filled with such deadpan scenes conveying that much of the absurd behavior of Suleiman’s Israeli Arabs is caused by the humiliating nature of their political situation. When in the film’s fourth section a melancholy, middle-aged Suleiman returns home to Nazareth, he watches life unfold there with a detached, almost mannered eye, rather than with anger.

Suleiman’s scenes are carefully choreographed tableaus. Some are too precious and opaque, but others are truly imaginative. In one Suleiman observes a giant IDF tank aiming its gun at a young Arab man, who pays no attention and goes on talking on his cell phone about records and a big dance party that night. In another, we witness the surreal sight of Suleiman vaulting over the barrier wall with ease. The Israelis are unable to control his capacity to fantasize. Though we see some Palestinians engage in street battles with the IDF, others can tune out the clamor and just listen to the music or take refuge, like Suleiman, in private reveries.

Suleiman’s vision is best summed up in the film’s stirring prologue, where a cab driver with a silent Suleiman as passenger gets lost in a violent storm and loses contact with his dispatcher. He asks plaintively “Where am I?” That’s the film’s implicit question, and the answers it offers are ambiguous.

The director’s deepest loyalties are to his Israeli-Arab identity, and to his home city, Nazareth. But, at the same time, he now lives in Paris and—as he suggests in the film’s subtitle, “Chronicle of a Present Absentee”—is in some kind of limbo. He has a hard time living with what he views as the volatile, oppressive, and absurd nature of being an Israeli Arab, but it remains the experience that shapes his art.

The Time that Remains has its tedious moments, but it’s a poetic, formally original, and acutely personal film. It exists in a complex and singular realm, worlds apart from a well-crafted, seamless, impersonal, and award-collecting film like The King’s Speech. It’s the fate of a unique film like Suleiman’s to never attract the audience it deserves.

Leonard Quart is in the process of co-authoring a fourth edition of American Film and Society Since 1945 and is a contributing editor of Cineaste.