PALESTINIAN FILM - IT MUST BE HEAVEN - NEW BLOG

IT MUST BE HEAVEN

Paul Byrnes, The Age Spectrum, 4 JULY 2020

Rated M, 97 minutes

★★★½

Palestinian director Elia Suleiman is hardly prolific, having made only three other features and a few documentaries and shorts in 30 years, but his work is worth the wait. It Must Be Heaven is the fourth feature, and it explains to some extent the long gaps in getting things made.

It is an autobiographical comedy in three locations, by turns satirical, slapstick, and rueful. Suleiman plays a version of himself, leaving Nazareth for Paris after the deaths of his parents, moving to the US, then returning ‘‘home’’ – except there is no real home for this Palestinian. Nazareth in northern Israel is never identified as the first location: you have to guess. That’s perhaps one of Suleiman’s over-developed artistic tendencies – he doesn’t want to spoonfeed us, so he sometimes tells us too little. That is also what some people love about his films – the open-endedness, the possibility of many readings, the inscrutability.

It’s not necessary to share that view to enjoy his humour, humanity and intelligence. He has been compared to Jacques Tati and Buster Keaton, in that he is the fool in the middle of most of his scenes, waiting to be poleaxed by life. There are a couple of moments that make clear his debt to those geniuses, hence my word slapstick, but most of his humour is more cerebral. An example is the scene in which tanks roll through the streets of Paris. It’s unexplained, chilling and ‘‘funny’’ only in its incongruity.

Behind the humour, there is a melancholy examination of the idea of permanent exile. Suleiman’s character is no longer comfortable in Nazareth, where Palestinians now predominate, and where he grew up. He finds that Paris and New York, where he goes to escape, are not quite ‘‘home’’ either.

Elia Suleiman is the fool in the middle of most of his scenes, waiting to be poleaxed by life.Credit:Potential Films

His character does not speak for the first half. He walks in eerily deserted streets in Nazareth, in a straw hat that never leaves his head. With his owlish glasses and beard, he looks like an Orthodox priest – and that’s perhaps intentional. Suleiman is from the ‘‘Roum’’ Greek Orthodox community in Israel, and the first scene is an irreverent joke about an Orthodox ceremony that goes wrong.

The only hint that his parents have died is a brief visit to the cemetery, and the empty house to which he returns. Gangs of armed youths roam the empty streets, freaking him out, so he leaves for Paris, where the streets are just as empty – except for all the pretty girls who stroll past in the sun, wearing flimsy dresses and showing their legs. Nina Simone sings ‘‘I put a spell on you’’ in this scene – a song he used in an earlier film.

A few of his actors are familiar too, suggesting continuity with his most recent features – The Time that Remains (2009) and Divine Intervention (2002). As if to explain the long time between, the straw-hatted man meets with a Paris producer, who’s full of praise for his work, but offers absolutely no money. We have a commitment to Palestinian film, he explains, but your film is perhaps not ‘‘Palestinian enough’’.

Suleiman’s observations on Paris and New York are wry, sometimes sharp, more expansively funny. Every person in the New York deli where he shops carries a weapon – even the children. Cops in Paris chase citizens through the streets on monowheels and roller skates. A French ambulance crew serves a homeless man with a full meal – chicken or fish – followed by coffee, before moving on. That idea of ‘‘no place’’ runs through a lot of these jokes, but quietly, with a tinge of chaos.

Suleiman has made more accessible films than this, but he has never been conventional. This is another hybrid – part essay film, part odyssey, not quite a travelogue, more like a psychic jigsaw. You have to put the pieces together yourself, and that is against all popular modes of current filmmaking. The mood is superbly sustained by emptying most of the locations of people (astounding, given some of the places he got closed down for filming, such as the entrance to the Louvre). It’s a soulful sort of comedy, rather than a thigh-slapper, but thoughtful is always better than its alternative.

Paul Byrnes

Paul Byrnes is a film critic for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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The 'perfect stranger' explores the power of silence

By Stephanie Bunbury

 

June 29, 2020 The Age

Wherever you go, there you are. It is one of the truisms of travel: that you bring more than just physical baggage with you. But Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman magnifies the idea in his deceptively winsome comedy It Must Be Heaven. Wherever he goes, Suleiman – who plays himself, albeit more flummoxed by the world than he seems to be in real life – finds himself in a version of Palestine.

It's all Palestine to him: Elia Suleiman in a scene from It Must Be Heaven. Credit:Potential Films

Helicopters whirr overhead in New York; ordinary citizens are inexplicably armed to the teeth in Paris; nothing seems to make sense anywhere. "My feeling is that the Palestinians might be one of the most oppressed and occupied peoples in the world today, but I can also say that unfortunately there are many layers and levels of occupations," he says. "Not only military, but also economic and psychological (ones)."

Similar tension and anxiety reign everywhere, he says. "Palestine becomes an elastic form of oppression."

Suleiman is 60. His character on screen, established in his 2002 film Divine Intervention, hardly ever speaks. "This time I said 'Nazareth' when the taxi driver asks where I'm from, and, 'I'm Palestinian'.

 They're not even words. They're codes," he says. "I think that, as much as you can do with an image, why do you need words? It's always a challenge to limit and censor information, but I cannot stand giving information in a film; I find that extremely boring. I prefer to leave things in the poetic. So I try to reduce as much as possible and let the cinema do what it can do."

The silence and melancholy that underlie his sense of the ridiculous might suggest Suleiman is paying homage to Chaplin; he could be a modern version of Chaplin's tramp, fortified against misadventure with books and a frequent flyer card. "But I think what's interesting about this is that I did not watch a lot of films in my life," he says. It could be, he muses, that he is just catching up with the past. "Maybe the silent part is coming as if I were living a century ago." Although he has an abiding love of old westerns, he doesn't watch a lot of films, even now. "I don't know what it is that I do a lot of. Maybe smoking and drinking."

For him, these things are a sort of work. After all, the human oddities chronicled in It Must Be Heaven are mostly garnered from life as seen from a succession of cafe tables. "If you come and sit with me in a cafe, you will see the same things I'm seeing," he says. "You just have to be alert and watch and daydream and space out and then come back. It's really a job with the features of unemployment; you have to do absolutely nothing, then take in stuff that's happening."

One of his most bitterly funny encounters is with a Parisian producer who was excited by the idea of making a film by a Palestinian director until he read it and realised it was a comedy. Like many of the vignettes in It Must Be Heaven, this is a slightly embroidered version of a real event. "It happened when I was trying to finance my first film in the '90s," he says. "The idea that a Palestinian makes a film that has humour was not exactly welcome in the 'lefty' world in Europe, because they are the patrons of the Palestinian cause." The problem, explains the po-faced producer (played by Vincent Maraval, one of his producers in real life), is that his script just isn't Palestinian enough. Why, it could have happened anywhere!

That is exactly the sense Suleiman wanted to convey. He chose Paris and New York as his character's boltholes because he had lived in each of them for 14 years, so he didn't marvel at them as a tourist would. "There is a kind of cross-border existence going on with quite a lot of us," he says. "This is about migration, not only of the unfortunate who drown in the sea, but also of the middle classes, who are now trapped in a sense of alienation about who they are and where they want to be."
As a fellow drinker slurs at Elia Suleiman's character in a New York bar, after taking in his recent zip around the world: "Are you the perfect stranger?"

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Edition No. 307 - 27 JUNE-3 JULY 2020 The Saturday Paper

In his latest film, It Must Be Heaven, Elia Suleiman continues to explore the absurdity and tragedy of being Palestinian, and weaves in a moving contemplation of the ageing body. By Christos Tsiolkas. 

Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven

 

Elia Suleiman in It Must Be Heaven.

Credit: Carole Bethuel

Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes last year but due to the Covid-19 crisis is only now getting a theatrical release in Australia, begins with an Orthodox priest in Nazareth leading his Easter congregation through a narrow alley of the old city. The believers are chanting as they approach an ancient church gate. The priest raps on the doors, only to be denied permission to enter. We don’t know why approval has been denied. We only hear the voices of the guards inside. Like a boxer preparing to enter the ring, the priest removes his koukoulion, rolls up the sleeves of his robe and walks into the church through a back entrance. We hear the sounds of the priest slapping the guards and we hear the men’s pleading and apologies. The priest flings the gate open and the congregation recommences its chanting, entering the church.
As always, nimbly and with a wicked comic sense, Suleiman introduces us to the surreal world of Palestinian existence, where the threat of violence always simmers just below the surface of the everyday, and where regulations and prohibitions are often unnamed and seemingly ridiculous. He is deeply influenced by two of the greatest comic directors in cinema history, Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, and like those filmmakers creates meticulous absurdist worlds of authority and surveillance. Suleiman shares Tati’s great talent to imagine and then create his own idiosyncratic spatial architecture, so the world we view in his films is at once familiar and strange.

In It Must Be Heaven he utilises highly stylised and elegantly composed tableaus, in which he is always a silent observer. Two hard-drinking men berate a waiter for daring to serve a meal doused in alcohol to their sister. Are they offended on behalf of their sibling, or is it a ploy to get some free drinks? A man picks fruit from a neighbour’s citrus tree, and then waters and tends to the garden. Are his intentions honourable or is it an attempt to appropriate his neighbour’s plot? We get the sense every interaction involves second-guessing, and that daily life is a constant negotiation of conflict.

Suleiman directs his actors to be deliberately theatrical in their gestures and performances, again emphasising a state in which everyone is aware of being under constant observation. Yet, as with the priest in the opening scene, Suleiman never condescends to or stands in self-righteous judgement of his characters.

The first of Suleiman’s films I saw was 2002’s Divine Intervention, and it was revelatory, firstly because of Suleiman’s phenomenal control as a filmmaker, and also for daring to make comedy out of one of the most intractable and unjust of all global conflicts, the denial of a homeland for the Palestinian people. Divine Intervention, which won the Jury Prize at Cannes in the year of its release, had the shock of the innovative when I saw it. I had never before quite felt that permission to laugh at a situation – the plight of the Palestinians – that had always been depicted with utmost seriousness or tragic weight. Seven years later Suleiman made The Time That Remains, which I think is an even greater film. The comedy is still there, as is the bemusement, but that film reaches back into Suleiman’s own family history to evoke the tragedy of the Palestinians’ dispossession by Israel since 1948.

It Must Be Heaven doesn’t have the audacious jolt for an audience that Divine Intervention did, nor does it have the operatic sweep of The Time That Remains. It is a much quieter film. Playing himself in the film, Suleiman leaves Nazareth for Paris and New York to try to get some money to finance a film. There is a great sequence in Paris where he is politely and with excruciating pomposity told by a film producer that his new script isn’t “Palestinian enough”. There is also some delightful poking fun at the absurdity of European Union laws, capturing both the benign and coercive aspects to much contemporary regulation.

However, though the Parisian scenes are as scrupulously composed as those in Nazareth, they seem static in comparison. We understand that Suleiman is being tongue in cheek in inserting himself in depopulated vistas of Notre Dame and the Louvre, but there are no comic payoffs or great insights generated from those moments. They remain pretty postcards. Apart from the obnoxious film producer, there aren’t any other distinctive characters in these sequences for Suleiman to play against, and this also accentuates the shapelessness of the scenes. I adore the weathered grace of Suleiman’s face, but he isn’t physically as capable a performer as Keaton or Tati. The film feels shambolic in this middle section.

Though the Parisian scenes are as scrupulously composed as those in Nazareth, they seem static in comparison.

 

Thankfully, the pace picks up when Suleiman arrives in New York. He seems genuinely fascinated by the contradictions of the United States, where violence is as endemic as in his homeland but where ethnic and racial singularity is corporatised. His puzzled reactions to a supermarket full of shoppers with guns, and to a conference of Palestinian artists that seems as much an evangelical revival meeting as it does a political discussion, form some of the funniest sequences in the film.

There’s also a wonderfully facetious cameo by Gael García Bernal, who is also in the US trying to drum up money for a film he wants to make about the colonisation of Mexico. Deftly, humorously, Suleiman and Bernal communicate their solidarity as non-Western filmmakers as well as the inevitable competition and division that come from their scrambling for money. This self-reflexivity skirts dangerously close to indulgence but it is tempered by a moving acknowledgement by Suleiman of the wearing effects of age on both dreams and aspirations. This is true for him as a filmmaker and as a Palestinian.

Age, and the limitations of the body, are themes subtly woven into It Must Be Heaven. They culminate in a scene where Suleiman visits a tarot card reader, and we hear the clairvoyant’s answer to a question that is never asked in the film but is central to everything we have witnessed. “Yes,” the fortune teller exclaims triumphantly, “There will be a Palestine.” And then with the turning of another card, he adds sadly, “But neither of us will be alive to see it.”

This contemplation of age makes sense of a scene in Paris that has troubled some reviewers of the film. Suleiman sits at a cafe and, in an extended slow-motion montage, we share his point of view as a parade of stylish and attractive women walk past. Ostensibly, the scene grates as a stereotypically sexist fetishising of young women. But I think Suleiman is very much aware of what he is doing here. If any of the women notice him, it is only to turn away in disdain. For the young women he might as well not exist. It is the film’s coda that makes sense of this scene, and also makes sense of the constant tension between observing and being observed – of having to perform being Palestinian – that is at the heart of Suleiman’s filmmaking.

In the final scene, Suleiman has returned to Nazareth and is getting drunk at a bar. A group of young Palestinians are dancing. They are straight and they are queer. The music shifts and it is a dance remix of the song “Arabiyon Ana” by Lebanese singer Yuri Mrakadi. The title translates to “I am an Arab” and the defiance of the song’s lyrics is echoed in the ecstatic response of the dancers. The music rises and the bodies move in sensual unison in the crammed bar. The euphoria of the moment returns us to the beginning of the film, to the more muted rapture of the Orthodox Christian chanting. It’s a different form of resurrection from that pledged to by the priest, but it is still a promise. The music becomes louder and louder.

As in the Paris cafe sequence, Suleiman is the old man, always the outsider, watching from his corner. It is exhilarating and it is deeply affecting. His desire doesn’t need to be spoken out loud. The old man is hoping that these young people will one day have what the Parisians and the New Yorkers take for granted. He is praying that these children will have a homeland, that one day they will see a Palestine.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on Jun 27, 2020 as "Heaven’s stakes".

Were so many of us wrong? Christos Tsiolkas on the new uncertainty

The Sydney Morning Herald

Were so many of us wrong? Christos Tsiolkas on the new uncertainty

In times of uncertainty, you deserve understanding.

By Christos Tsiolkas

April 3, 2020 

He who has not lived in the years before the revolution cannot know what the sweetness of living is. – Talleyrand

We are on day six of our self-isolation. Has it been less than a week since we caught the flight from London to Dubai, then Dubai to Melbourne? The COVID-19 virus has done many things, the most daunting and terrible being the lives that it has taken, but one of its aftershocks that has surprised me most is the alteration it has caused to our sense of time.

Christos Tsiolkas: ''I know, in my gut now, that Melbourne, that Australia, is home.''Credit:Eddie Jim

Three weeks ago, we landed in Britain and though we joked and bantered about touching elbows rather than kissing, we did hug and embrace friends, we went out to dinners and we got drunk and sat shivering around outside heaters, shoulder to shoulder, in the freezing English spring night. Day by day, however, the anxiety and fears grew.

Throughout the first week, and then into the second, I receive constant emails from home announcing that first this festival and then another would be cancelled. On a train to Glasgow, preparing my reading for an event, my phone vibrates and a text informs me that the AyeWrite Festival has also been cancelled. By the third day in Scotland, reading the escalating warnings on the internet, my partner, Wayne, and I make the decision to return home.

We are fortunate. We booked our journey through a travel agent and within minutes of emailing him, he has got us on a flight departing London in two days. We know that there are many people not so lucky. The websites of all the airlines are crashing. The phones are not being answered. All we want is to return home. That very notion, home, one that I have questioned and resisted and challenged for so many years; that notion, too, has been altered by the virus. I know, in my gut now, that Melbourne, that Australia, is home.

There is a strange and befuddling moment in Dubai airport. All the world seems to be there. We are Australians and New Zealanders, Nigerians and Ghanaians, Pakistani and Bangladeshi, North American and Latin American, many of us scrolling on phones and laptops and iPads, seeking information on which borders have been closed, whether we can indeed go home. Some of us are sitting still and staring out into space, shifting in those uncomfortable vinyl chairs, trying to not touch and not to breathe on one another.

I am two seats away from a young woman, poised and elegantly dressed, her hair hidden under a rainbow-coloured turban. She is speaking on her phone in rapid French. My own French is weak but I gather she has managed to get on a flight to Lagos and from Lagos she will do her best to head home. Wherever home may be. “Paris was strange,” she says into her phone. “Everything was closed, everything was shut. I’ve never seen it like that.”

And it’s at that precise moment, overhearing her conversation, looking around me at the people staring at their screens, that it strikes me how bizarre and ridiculous it is that we all have only so recently been zig-zagging around the world, taking this freedom and this movement and this privilege for granted. It isn’t a moral aversion that I am experiencing. It isn’t righteousness; it is more a recognition of absurdity. I turn to Wayne when he comes back from the long wait for the toilets.

“All of this, it’s unnecessary.”

“No, we need to get home, this is serious.”

“No, not that. All this travel, all this movement, that is what is unnecessary.”

''All this travel, all this movement, that is what is unnecessary.''Credit:Getty Images

On returning home, I find a series of emails from Australian literary festivals and arts organisations bemoaning the deleterious effect of COVID-19 on the arts sector. I understand and share these fears. I’m one of the lucky ones, able to support myself from writing. But for most of my friends, their creative work is subsidised by work in hospitality, in retail, in the public sector and in non-government welfare organisations. The abrupt and shocking collapse of the economy has us all reeling. And has us all frightened. Theatres are no longer putting on plays and cinemas are shut; book launches and writing classes are cancelled.

Again, time has refracted back on itself and the arguments and politics and conversations we were all so engaged with, so furious and so passionate about only a few weeks ago, seem ephemeral and unimportant. Unemployment is now the most pressing issue affecting us all.

It isn’t an abrupt leap from where we were only yesterday to the dystopian end-of-times of apocalypse. The in-between will be our lifetime.

Of course, there is the desire to avoid the getting and the passing on of the virus. But those images of thousands of desperate souls lining up outside Centrelink are what has brought the severity of what we are all undergoing into deepest focus. The people in the queues are clearly ourselves – how we dress, how we use our mobiles, that negotiation of both digital and physical space – yet they also are evocative of a past that we never really imagined we would see again: the echoes of the Great Depression.

Writers and filmmakers and artists have always imagined apocalyptic scenarios, and climate change and rising inequality has made that a central concern of recent speculative art and fiction. But whether it is the savage and nihilistic violence of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, or the scenes of zombie rampage and annihilating natural disasters that have proliferated in popular cinema, what we hadn’t conceived was the moment of in-between. I think this is why the dole queues are particularly frightening. They remind us that it isn’t an abrupt leap from where we were only yesterday – blithely assuming that the future would be ever-progressive and ever-prosperous – to the dystopian end-of-times of apocalypse. The in-between will take years. The in-between will be our lifetime.
So I worry for my friends who are writers and artists and playwrights and filmmakers. But I am equally worried for my friends who are nurses and couriers and administrators and teachers. All those differences we were extolling and idolising only a few weeks ago, they don’t matter much any more. In this moment, community trumps difference.

In between the pinging emails announcing the cancellation of one more writers’ festival and one more play, there have also been links to performances and artwork that people are creating online. There is indeed something exhilarating and defiant in the determination of the artist to keep making work. It might be my age or merely my disposition but I also sense something melancholy in the production of such work. A chamber orchestra plays in an vacant auditorium, a drag artist mimes in front of a DJ in an empty room. What is missing, and what is wretched, is that without the physical bodies of an audience, the work seems mere rehearsal. It is not unlike the few minutes of an AFL match I watched played without a crowd. The emptiness was deafening. I switched off the game. Guiltily, I switched off the music.

In some ways, I have been surprised by how much I have enjoyed this period of enforced isolation. In saying that, I know that I am fortunate. That I have a partner, a lovely home and shelves stacked with books and with LPs and with DVDs. We have friends and family and neighbours who make sure there is food on our doorstep and wine in our fridge.

I’m not a complete Luddite: YouTube and streaming have also kept me company. Yet it is the pleasures of the analogue world that have been the most satisfying and the most sustaining. I am halfway through a wonderful book, Jean-Michel Guenassia’s The Incorrigible Optimists Club, a tender requiem for the generation of eastern European dissidents who fled totalitarianism and wound up lost and exiled in Paris. It has been sitting by my bed for nearly two years now.

This morning, I was dancing to Hiperasia, a cheerfully inventive album by the Spanish electronica artist, El Guincho. As with the Guenassia novel, I’ve had it for some time. Only now do I give it a proper listen. Refracted through the changes brought about by the virus, the recent past seems an aeon ago. All the same, it has made me thankful for the present moment. Real time. The time of minutes and hours. The time of patience and reflection.

I miss people. Wayne and I discuss the progression of the virus, the responses globally and locally, the uncertain future that is coming. We both miss other voices, other perspectives, the opportunity to have one’s argument contested and opposed. Of course, this is possible online but Skype crackles and falters, the thin sounds on the other end don’t have the resonance of the human voice. Digital communication also exacerbates the limitations and prejudices of only speaking to those who think the same way you do.

There will come a time when we can return to the world, when social distancing will be the past. But there will be a ruined economy and there will be fractured communities. It is inevitable that this ruin and this fracturing will be part of the writing and the art that is to come. Every day, I wander the hall, the rooms of our house, I walk into the garden and tell myself I should write. But all my ideas seem paltry and inadequate. It is a cliche, and also a truth, that writing is a solitary labour. It is only now, physically separated from friends and colleagues, that I realise how much sustenance and inspiration I receive from their insights, their conversation and their argument. A room of one’s own is a necessity. It is not enough. These are the conversations that I want to have.

So many of us writers are progressive and left-wing, feminist and anti-racist. In one sense, the virus and its consequences have been a validation. Our coalition government, who for so many years rubbished the stimulus choices of the Rudd Labor government during the Global Financial Crisis, is now legislating for the state to commandeer and protect the economy. The tenets of economic liberalism that have dominated the globe for more than 50 years have been smashed by the urgency and virulence of this virus.

Yet there is another canonical ideal of liberalism that has also been demolished by the recent weeks, and that is the belief in open borders. While we waited to get out of Europe, country after country closed itself off from the rest of the world. In this sense, the virus and its consequences have validated the conservative voices that defend the nation state. It is not transglobal entities that are doing the work of looking after communities. It is the nation state. Were so many of us wrong? Were we shouting over people when maybe we should have been listening? Had we assumed racism and xenophobia whenever we heard an argument that challenged our beliefs? Had we forsaken questioning for certainty? And if so, what does that mean for the fiction we’ve been writing and the arguments we have been mounting?

I worry about the overreach of state power in the responses to the virus. They are necessary, they are medically and scientifically sanctioned, but the powers of surveillance and control now being deployed are deeply illiberal. And once enacted such powers may be difficult to reverse. I am shocked at how little weight the notion of liberty seems to have among my peers. A formative political awakening for me was the politics of AIDS. Some of the finest writing and the best art of the 1980s came out of provocation and resistance at the demonisation, and the attempts of state control, over people’s bodies. That suspicion of the state – of its courts and judiciary, of its police and its military, of its bureaucracy and of its power – seems to be a matter of little concern to a present generation of writers and artists.

An equal shock has been the relative silence over the actions of the Communist Party of China. Other governments have made mistakes or have had to backtrack on initial responses but it has been the CPC that has been the most appalling actor in this short history of COVID-19; in its initial recklessness in turning a blind eye to the conditions that allowed for its incubation, and in the terrifying repression it has visited on its own citizens.

I worry that we writers and artists have been woefully undergraduate in our rage over the past decade, tilting at the same bloody windmills. And maybe our understanding of history has been equally pitiful. The greatest gift reading history has done, is make me suspicious of certainty. Maybe that’s the conversation I’m really hankering to have. After the past few months, after these transformations, can a writer still adhere to certainty?

When we emerge out of our isolation, the world will be smaller and our horizons will be local. The priority will be solidarity and communion with the unemployed; everything else is not unimportant, but everything else will be secondary.

I also hope we emerge hungry for argument and conversation and debate. I hope our writing and our art asks more questions and doesn’t pretend to have all the answers.