Elia Suleiman’s fifth feature film It Must Be Heaven is one of four important films made in 2019 with semi-autobiographical
components from the life of the four respective filmmakers. The three others films are Spanish director Pedro Almodovar’s Pain and Glory, US/Italian director
Abel Ferraro’s Tommaso and the British director Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir. Among the four
films, only It Must Be Heaven has
its director appearing in front of
the camera and that too without hiding under a fictional name/alter ego.
 |
| Director Elia Suleiman as he appears in the film, travelling in a Parisian metro train |
Mr Suleiman’s film has the director appearing with a signature
hat and wearing a dark jacket and spectacles. He does not speak a word while
others talk to him. He is obviously absorbing activities physically close to
him, sometimes perplexed, sometimes bemused, and sometimes immersed in thought.
The viewer would see parallels between
his screen persona and Jacques Tati’s Monsieur Hulot in Tati’s films Mr Hulot’s Vacation, My Uncle, Playtime
and Traffic. Unlike Tati’s four films with the
fictional Hulot as an extension of Tati, Suleiman prefers to be identified by
his real identity Elia Suleiman, the Palestinian film director, delicately comparing
the no-win situation for Palestinians within Palestine with parallel situations
for a Palestinian or any person of colour or limited means living (or visiting)
in France and in USA. Why France and the
US? The director explained, in an interview, that he had lived in each of those
two countries for 14 years apiece. For those viewers who are familiar with John
Berger’s seminal book on art appreciation Ways
of Seeing and the related TV series made in 1972 will see the connection
between Berger’s work and ways to
approach (as a viewer) Suleiman’s It
Must Be Heaven. Berger had maintained in his book that “photographs always
need language and a narrative to make complete sense.” The visuals of It Must Be Heaven become richer with
the spoken words and narrative structure of the film. Thus a viewer who misses
out on the director’s dedication statement at the end of the film or one who
does not know about John Berger and his book will only get a diluted taste of
the film’s rich visual, seemingly unconnected, episodes that are actually strung
like beads of an ornate necklace.
 |
| A Palestinian man drinking Scotch whiskey but upset that his sister has been served food with wine as an ingredient, as women are not supposed to imbibe wine or liquor |
What is admirable about the film It Must Be Heaven is its ability to criticize Palestinians while
making a film that is indirectly supporting their cause. The opening sequence
is of a Greek Orthodox Easter ritual (in Bethlehem?) where a bishop, leading
his flock of worshippers, knocks three times on the door of a holy crypt
expecting it to be opened from inside by the church staff. The inebriate person behind the door refuses
to open the door, until the irate Bishop removes his religious headgear and
physically forces the inebriate individual to open the crypt door by accessing
the crypt through another entrance. The viewer can hear the distinct breaking
of a bottle, possibly by the angry Bishop. Suleiman is criticizing both the
church and the inebriate Palestinians. The director Suleiman is a Palestinian
Christian. In another tableau, reminiscent of Roy Anderssons’ films, Suleiman
while sitting in a restaurant in Palestine watches two Muslim male Palestinians
sitting on another table and imbibing Scotch whiskey, while their sister is eating
on the same table. Suddenly they complain about the food served to their sister
to the restaurant owner about a change in the taste of the dish, which their
sister had enjoyed in the past. The
restaurant owner explains that the dish has been prepared with a dash of wine
for the first time to enhance the taste. The explanation only angers the men as
their sister is not permitted to consume liquor (for religious reasons?) and
their anger is doused by the restaurant owner who offers them free Scotch whiskey
to make amends for having served a food preparation that contained wine. Then
there are Palestinians who steal their neighbour’s lemons in the guise of
tending the lemon trees, men who tell unbelievable tales of snakes who fill air in a flat tire
and repair it and a woman who trudges a distance multiple times because she is
carrying two vessels of water, one vessel at a time.
Suleiman takes swipes at the callous attitudes of Israeli
policemen in two separate vignettes. In one, Suleiman, driving his car, passes
an Israeli police car with its two policemen switching their sunglasses
playfully, while a blindfolded Palestinian woman (arrested, one assumes) sits
behind them quietly. In another vignette,
two Israeli policemen are busy with a set of binoculars, while close at hand a
vagrant urinates on the street and smashes his liquor bottle, not attracting
the attention of those cops.
 |
| Director Suleiman in Paris, in front of a shop appropriately named "The Human Comedy" |
All these delectable/critical views of “home” (Palestine +
Israel) are contrasted and compared with Suleiman’s “homes away from home”
(France + USA) in the latter part of It
Must Be Heaven.
The film director returns to France and then to USA seeking
financial support for his next film. The converse visuals in France and in USA,
appear to be unconnected but are sending messages for perceptive viewers. In a Parisian near-empty metro rail car a
menacing young man glares at the docile Suleiman, and the viewer expects an
ugly event, until you see him eventually playing with beer cans. The viewer has
to put the sequence in perspective with another one earlier in the film where Suleiman is walking on a lonely street
in Palestine/Israel when he sees that he is followed by menacing youngsters with
sticks. As in the Paris metro sequence, we soon realize that the scary youths
have targets other than the lonely, apprehensive Suleiman. The John Berger elements
come into play on both continents, in parallel situations, within the film.
 |
| Director Suleiman sitting in front of a bistro/restaurant, while the policemen check the distance of the furniture from the road, to see if it conforms to rules |
Similarly Suleiman doesn’t merely poke fun at Israeli policemen;
he draws parallels with Paris policemen measuring the seating area of French restaurants/bistros that spill on to the sidewalka with help of measuring tapes, cops riding Segways
(electric scooters) as though they were ballerinas dancing on a road theatre (touches of Tati?) pursuing a criminal on the
run. In USA, too, airport police are very suspicious of foreigners like
Suleiman and ask him step aside for a detailed physical check, while men and women
openly carry guns into US supermarkets while doing their shopping. In New York’s Central Park, a woman dressed as an angel disrobes in public, while cops swoop in on her.
In Paris,
the street cleaners are all blacks: in USA, the upmarket women’s wear boutique
kept lit in the night to attract potential customers is cleaned by a black
woman. who obviously cannot afford the clothes on display.
 |
| Suleiman waiting outside a prospective producer's office to seek funds for his next film |
In this Palestinian film, where spoken words from the
protagonist (the director of the film) are totally missing, songs are carefully
chosen to make-up for this silence. Surprisingly but fittingly it includes the
song Darkness written and sung by
Leonard Cohen, a Canadian secular Jew, who sings:
I got no future,
I know my days are few
The present's not that pleasant
Just a lot of things to do
I thought the past would last me
But the darkness got that too
For me, this was the most rewarding
film among the four 2019 autobiographical films mentioned earlier, not merely for
its content but more for its humour and detailed observations of people and
their behaviour. John Berger would have
approved, so would Suleiman’s dead parents.
P.S. It Must Be Heaven is
one of the author’s top 20 films of 2019. The film won the FIPRESCI prize and a Special Mention from the
competition jury at the Cannes Film Festival and the Eurimages Award at the
Seville European Film Festival. Pedro Almodovar’s Pain and Glory and Abel Ferraro’s Tommaso are also on the author’s top 20 films list of 2019. However, Divine Intervention, an earlier work of the same director does not offer even a remote semblance of the maturity of It Must Be Heaven.
No comments :
Post a Comment