The Time That Remains (2010) dir. Elia Suleiman
Starring: Ali Suliman, Elia Suleiman, Saleh Bakri, Samar Qudha Tanus, Shafika Bajjali

***

By Alan Bacchus

Elia Suleiman's autobiographical portrait of 60+ years of his Palestinian family living under occupation in Israel is brought to life with his own brand of silent cerebral comedy. This highly regarded film played notably at Cannes and Toronto, and now a couple of years later it makes its way to DVD. From the mix of sharp and highly personal political commentary and wicked black comedy, indeed it feels like an auteur presence at the helm with very important subject matter. Unfortunately, Suleiman's insistence on style distances himself from his subjects at the most crucial points in the film. But politically it's a powerhouse, in line with other fine political comedies from marginalized peoples, such as Tales from the Golden Age and Goodbye Lenin.

Suleiman begins in 1948 with the victory of the Israelis in creating their own state at the expense, of course, of the native Palestinians, including Fuad, the patriarch of the Suleiman family and a rebellious young man keen on fighting the Israelis in the name of his people. Director Suleiman structures the film in a series of episodes over the course of this period, with Fuad and his family as the throughline.

In the ‘70s, Fuad is a father and a family man, reluctantly accepting of his position, but quietly eager and worried that his son has continued the tradition of rebelliousness. Unfortunately, he would later see his son forced to leave the country when he's an adult and thus more dangerous to the establishment. The film ends with Fuad and his wife quietly contemplating their life together in a land of perpetual conflict.

Suleiman is not shy to wear his opinion loud and proud. The Israelis are portrayed as war mongering control freaks, shamefully denigrating the people they have ‘conquered’. The opening scene of the Israeli leaders giving the Palestinian leaders their one-sided terms of surrender and then in the same breath asking to take their picture with them is utterly painful and comically tragic.

Much of the comedy comes silent without dialogue from the observance of the sad ironies. Suleiman's strong wide-angle compositions and portraits highlight both the absurdity and horror of war. Perhaps the most memorable image comes towards the end of this film. It’s a shot of a tank pointing its gun at a Palestinian man walking casually from his home. The site of the massive gun mere inches away from the innocent man is monumentally absurd, but representative of the statement the film wants to make.

In the final segment, the concerted lack of emotion from the characters wears thin, and as the picture comes to its close we desperately want to engage with them, but don't. Suleiman, who goes in front of the camera to play the elder Fuad (I think?), enacts his Tati/Keaton persona, a sequence wherein Fuad simply walks into rooms, stares at his wife sitting on her balcony and then walks away. Comparisons have been made to the silent mugging of Buster Keaton, but silence is about the only thing these two have in common. Here, the segment is egotistical and furthers the distance from his characters for the sake of his artificial aesthetic.

It’s a shame the film peters out with art house obtuseness instead of elevating and intensifying itself to make a stronger statement.

The Time That Remains is available on DVD from EOne Home Entertainment in Canada.

The Human Resources Manager (2010) dir. Eran Riklis
Starring: Mark Ivanir, Gila Almagor, Noah Silver, Guri Alfi, Roni Koren

***

By Alan Bacchus

A touching black comedy with a heart of gold, The Human Resources Manager is the story of a jaded and grumpy HR Manager stuck with the duty of delivering the corpse of a former employee to her estranged Eastern European family for burial.

Thought it’s an Israeli film, there’s a strong European flavour to it, like the work of Aki Kaurismaki. The film arrives on DVD courtesy of Film Movement, which is curating festival films as part of a DVD of the Month club. The staid, deadpan comedic tone fits in well with many of their other titles.

The film is part road trip journey, but it’s mostly a character study of the unnamed worker bee who works as the HR Manager at a large bakery in Israel. When an employee turns up dead in a car bomb explosion, the media links the worker to the bakery. After a defamatory article against the treatment of the deceased employee breaks, the company assigns our reluctant hero, the HR Manager, to band-aid the situation. This means setting the record straight with the press, a particularly suspect tabloid reporter, and making his company look thoughtful and decent. Soon the man finds himself lugging the corpse and coffin around town looking for a next of kin to relieve him of his duty.

Despite his annoyance with the situation, his conscience compels him to stay with the dead woman and find her relatives in Romania. Now he finds himself a fish out of water, a Jew in the devout Catholic, post-Communist doldrums of rural Romania, where the formerly cynical man transforms into a humane gentleman.

Director Riklis (The Syrian Bride, Lemon Tree) conveys a gritty naturalistic style typical of this kind of mid-range budget international feature. The Dardenne Brothers come to mind, but they never really had a funny bone. The dead-pan comedy and vérité authenticity reminds us of the Romanian films of today, or even some of those early Kieslowski films from Decalogue.

By its very nature, the act of transporting a dead body across such a large distance gives this an existential quality. Though we never meet the dead woman, the fact that her body is unwanted by everyone the man encounters forces us to consider the effect of her life on the lives of others. The comedic irony of the man who is barely connected to her suddenly becoming her caretaker, and thus developing a strange attachment to her, is fascinating, soulful and reflective.

The Human Resources Manager was an Official Selection at the Toronto International Film Festival, among others, and is now available as the DVD of the Month from Film Movement.

Footnote "Hearat Shulayim" (2011) dir. Joesph Cedar
Starring Shlomo Bar-Aba, Lior Ashkenazi and Micah Lewensohn.

**

By Blair Stewart

What a wonderful plot for a comedy. What an utterly over-directed film.

Footnote from Israel prods at two universal sources of humour – the persnickety egos of tenured professors, and the buffoonish moods of fathers and maybe, just maybe, their sons. Perhaps.

Professor Eliezer Shkolnik (Shlomo Bar-Aba) has been buried so deep in Talmudic studies he's emerged on the late side of life a grumpy old homunculus. One of his many rivals in Jewish academia on the opposite end of what he regards as frivolous research happens to be his son Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi), who is more gregarious but retains that Shkolnik family touchiness.

From the opening, comprised of a close-up of Eliezer listening to a long painful speech, the backstabbing and pettiness in their insular world bleeds out. Eliezer has been waiting on the coveted Israel prize for his painstaking study of his peoples' history, but several decades of zilch has reduced him to a curmudgeonly existence. Shkolnik's disposition hasn't been helped with the cherry-picking by his arch-rival Grossman (Micah Lewensohn, blessed with one of the great knotted brows in cinema, as he appears to have sand dunes attached above his eyebrows) of his life's work and his only claim to fame a throwaway mention in an obscure book: Eliezer is the footnote. The story shifts around leading up to that speech, as the Shkolnik clan all spin off in their different trajectories.

An intelligent comedy that lampoons the intelligencia, Footnote distracts from the humorous performances of Ashkenazi, Bar-Aba and Lewensohn with unnecessarily flashy inter-titles, cross-cutting and deadweight voice-over. It's a droll comedy, directed like a David Fincher thriller.

The stylistic choices are the director's literal expression of Bar-Aba's study, and the film needed something much more subtle. After the first scenes of witty dialogue supported by actors with chemistry and pace, they're let down by moments of tedium. For instance, why are there needless moments of characters walking about, often away from the camera? Is their ass supposed to be funny, or is it a break so I can catch my breath from the guffaws? I appreciate a film told with clarity. We don't need to see the short-ends.

A few notable supporting characters are also either vastly underwritten or have had their lines splashed across the cutting room floor. Earlier scenes of promise featuring the supporting cast members never receive a payoff, which makes the previous time spent with them wasteful. Lastly, the score of Footnote is painfully insistent throughout, as it constantly crashes into the movie as if it was a drunk elephant on a cruise ship. Silence would have sufficed.

Footnote is a waste of talent, but my dad just might enjoy it for Bar-Aba's grouchiness.

Lebanon (2009) dir. Samuel Maoz
Starring: Itay Tiran, Yoav Donat, Michael Moshonov, Zohar Shtrauss

***

By Alan Bacchus

The surprise Venice Golden Lion winner of 2009 is an intense adventure using the same subject matter as Waltz with Bashir—another Israeli take on the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. This time we’re put into a tank with four Israeli soldiers. There’s Assi the commander, Shmulik the gunner, Yigal the driver and Hertzel the loquacious loader. Being friends as well as comrades means that Assi often has difficulty asserting his orders to the group, specifically with Hertzel, who questions the logic of the chain of command and the hierarchy of duties. It makes for light, humorous banter, dulling us to the horror going on outside the tank.

But when Major Jamil enters the tank, orders get thrown down with authority. With clarity, Jamil makes it simple—proceed through the recently demolished village, look for surviving enemy soldiers and contain any lingering threats. We’re told it’s a walk in the park until they get to their next destination, an impending battle in San Tropez.

The tank has two points of view, a wide angle pigeonhole target sight of the gun and a closer zoomed in view from the same angle. From these two shots we watch as Shmulik slowly goes stir crazy due to the brutality he’s forced to watch happening on the outside. A family being shot to death in a vacant building, an innocent Muslim blown apart in his car and even a cow clinging to life with his stomach torn open are indelible images to both Shmulik and the audience.

For the others, the intensity increases because of the earth-quaking caused by the explosions and the devastating sounds of war echoing through the steel machine. Like the metallic claustrophobia of the German sub in Das Boot, the confines of the metal tank serves as the film’s only location. The space is tight and perhaps Maoz used Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat as inspiration to maintain a dynamic and non-repetitive visual experience in such a small place. But it's important to note this film was made before the rash of single location thrillers of 2010 (i.e., 127 Hours, Frozen, Buried, etc.)

The few sources of light create enough creative light schemes to play with. And the occasional time when the hatch is opened up, a blinding beam of light is sent into the tank, which is enough to remind us that there is another world outside.

Admirable as it is, in creating an intense war film without really seeing anything, the film suffers from our uncertainty about whether the filmmakers are actually taking a stand on something. War is bad, we know. Perhaps it’s the singular point of view of the tank as a metaphor for the unwavering party line of the Israeli military. Maybe. It’s an implied theme, which we have to stretch to find, but it lacks the passionate confessional tone of Waltz with Bashir. And so it fails to raise itself to the cinematic level of brilliance the concept and the era in history demands.