The Time That Remains
Largely biographical narrative on the stormy relations between Israelis and Palestinians, “The Time That Remains” is timely, while Egypt is plunged into civil war. A chronicle comic, poetic and quite liberating.
This third feature film by Elia Suleiman, who was featured in a festival in Montreal has never failed to display it in a room in Quebec. Although it was launched on a screen as a thief without the traditional advertising campaign, the film is well worth a visit.
As usual, the director of the excellent “Divine Intervention” speaks of the Palestinian identity and dialogue – rather its absence – with Israel. This time he draws on his father’s diaries and letters from his mother to trace the decades of fighting for freedom and hindered his fiction beginning in 1948 to finish the infancy of 21th century.
The result is nothing less than astounding. Instead of getting lost in the historical story, the filmmaker celebrates the soul of his characters with vitality and courage. The heroes and heroines are endowed with irresistible colors, they will live extraordinary adventures that will exceed all.
A finding which was not always clearly evident. Despite its ambitious subject and its careful staging that leaves the part in great silences, ellipses some tough time sometimes prevent the correct understanding of the story. Not necessarily explain all the political, the narrative pushes times in four different time units, the latest is not up to the previous.
These details are fortunately that junk to the pleasure experienced. The look of the author full of humor and clever allusions developed tasty. Laughing to tears at many moments of grace, whether the introduction where a soldier does not know where to go to free a city, this confrontation in a single plane between the army and doctors, or the tank that keeping watch. Several passages can also deliberately repetitive grasp the absurdity of this routine cruelly stabbing, which should not necessarily paper to go fishing, where a neighbor’s suicide is sometimes the best comic engine, and where a child learns the hard way the close ties between Israel and the United States. Segments unforgettable worn by performers deliberately tongue-in-cheek.
Not to be confused with the film under almost the same name by François Ozon, “The Time That Remains” is a delightfully offbeat opus, a little too long, but always appropriate, which refuses false nostalgia for an era explosive (and still is) to forge a personal portrait of the existence of its creator. What new things and dig the topic is still relevant.
