Reviews » The Time That Remains
A frozen look back to the origin
A taxi drives in the dark, in the middle of a furious storm. As usual, a very talkative driver bothers the passenger who is sitting in the back, a vague shadow barely recognizable as the still and mute figure of Elia Suleiman, the main character/director of The Time That Remains, the film that has just begun. Suddenly, the driver stops, completely disoriented by the pouring rain: “I no longer know where we are.”
Very few words encumber the “time that remains” of the film. Suleiman himself won’t speak any. For the time that remains, the film and Suleiman just look back. In a totally disoriented present time, one is forced to look back to the origins to find some direction. This attitude of course has a lot to do with myth: a narration about the origins, and a way to come to terms with our fatal separation from them.
“Origins” in this film means basically two things. One is the 1948 foundation of Israeli State (and the consequences this has brought along for the Palestinian people). The other is literally Elia Suleiman’s personal origins: his father and his mother (who died shortly before filming). In the past centuries, this would have meant to intertwine “the great History, the one with a capital H” and the smaller, personal one. Now things are necessarily different.
For a Palestinian director, showing the foundation of the Israeli State is not an easy move, to say the least. Right after the title, we see the official surrender of the Arab forces, with even the sign and the ritual photographs. The disorders that follow involve Fuad Suleiman, Elia’s father, who was caught and arrested by the Israeli army while assisting a blessed person on the street. He is beaten and thrown from the top of a cliff.
Here comes the first, important detour. The great, foundational, mythic event does not originate a History, as a mythical origin might. On the contrary, it originates the absence of History. The Suleiman family (an obvious metaphor for the condition of the “Israeli-Arabs”) live the years following 1948 as exiled from History, as well as from their own land. History disappears, only daily life is left. Fuad slowly recovers from the “accident”, and his hopes to be able to act politically again slowly but inexorably fade away. Meanwhile, Elia is born, he goes to school, the fathers dies, the mother grows old and so on. Politics becomes a matter of TV news; nevertheless, History is far from being gone for good: the violence of course remains, the oppression is palpable. But it all happens at the margins of life.
And here comes the second, crucial detour. “The simple truth of daily life” does not face a History which is distant from common people, because daily life itself is estranged, marginal, as far away and emptied out as the “big History” is. This “chronicle of an absent present” (the second title of the film) is only made of little, almost soundless, frozen sketches, depicting the fussy neighbors bothering the mother, the nights spent by father and son fishing in the sea while being constantly watched over by the Israeli guards, adolescent Elia spying the flirting couples, and dozens of such ordinary micro-events.
So we’re not really faced with “daily life”, but just with “the ghost of daily life,” as it were – a question taken up by the style of the film. Elia Suleiman is one of the very few contemporary directors who actually has absorbed and retained the lesson of the great comedy directors Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton (with whom Suleiman’s unmoving and frowning persona shares an unmistakable resemblance). Like theirs, his (mostly large) shots are fixed, motionless, built around a carefully-composed graphic interplay of lines, angles, vectors. Nothing seems to happen within the stiff geometry with which every frame is composed, because of the rigorous economy of the editing cuts. And yet, something suddenly stands out of place, something unexpectedly moves and provokes the comical effect: in Suleiman’s previous Divine intervention (2002) we followed a very long and quiet fixed shot of Elia eating a fruit while driving, when he suddenly throws the stone out of the window, and an Israeli tank nearby explodes.
The severe graphical abstraction through which the most trivial and everyday acts are rendered (such as a woman doing the washing in the courtyard) functions as as comical effect. And indeed, the film is hilarious. The emptiness of a life reduced to exile is then occasionally lit by a number of gags; the time that remains after having been banned from life is spotted with gags, the film is finally just a series of gags. Elia pole-vaulting a wall – and yes, it is that wall. A guy going out of his house to throw the garbage, followed by the gun of a tank step after step; then the guy answers the mobile phone, takes a walk here and there, and the gun moves after him, right, left, right, left, with no derangement whatsoever on the part of the guy.
The film is moreover very touching thanks to its faultless stylization. A frontal close up of young Elia in front of the Pharmacy, staring at (another close-up, a profile one this time) his father getting older and falling asleep in the car. Back to Elia’s close up again. Black dissolve: an ellipsis signaling that the father has died. One of the most beautiful scenes in recent cinema, and one of the simplest too: just three static frames where nothing happens, nothing is verbally said, and everything that needs to be told is told.
This stylization illustrates both the tragic 1948 days and the ordinary days of Suleiman family from then on. History rejoins daily life, but just because of the absence at the core of both, because both are (firstly graphically) estranged in a sort of exile. The foundational myth (1948) has not given birth to the History of a people (the Palestinian), but to the absence of History, i.e. to daily life – but only in the sense that life itself is nothing but a myth.
In a way, even the Palestinian people is absent. If one compares this latest opus with Suleiman’s Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) and Divine Intervention, it is easy to see how The Time That Remains clings far less to local connotations than his other movies. True, some specific places constantly return film after film (especially the bar at the crossroads where Elia meets his friends), but what we see in The Time That Remains appears much less like Ramallah than like an anonymous non-place. The faceless apartment building where most of the film is set could literally be anywhere – significantly enough, Suleiman has declared that according to the original project the film was supposed to take place in a number of different locations all over the world. So Suleiman is not as interested in depicting a specific geopolitical condition, despite its quintessentially symptomatic nature as “the” eternal conflict summing up any other conflict throughout the world, as he is in depicting a universal condition, the global exile the contemporary world is in. Of course, the supreme irony of this very ironic film is that it says “everyone is exiled” in front of the exiled people par excellence: the Jews. And again, to reach this universal condition, Suleiman needed the myth, or what remains of the myth after History is cancelled from human horizon: a coming back to one’s origin, as if he were asking, “How did my parents face their exile? Could they possibly be an example for me, having to face the global exile of contemporary world? Can I find some inspiration from their attitude toward everyday life?”
Through the insistant immobility of the shots and the repetitious flow of the micro-events of daily life, time seems to never pass. But, on the other hand, it does so painfully: while Elia is first a child, and then a young boy, and then a grown man, his parents get older and older, and die. While following the quiet flow of time and the detailed deployment of ordinary situations step by step, sometimes suddenly something happens, a comical impulse finds its way. Time goes out of joint, some kind of synchrony infiltrates amidst this relentless diachrony, some kind of resistance and reaction against an unbeatable power is perhaps found (this is what the very last shot very explicitly states), even if it’s only a laugh. Someone who had a certain experience with myths (Claude Lévi-Strauss) used to say that the most succinct possible definition of myth is time becoming space. Like Elia Suleiman’s parents (literally his origins) saved from their inevitable decay and made into a respectful and heartfelt image.
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