Saturday, January 29, 2011

The Time That Remains (2009)

Director: Elia Suleiman. Cast: Saleh Bakri, Elia Suleiman. 109 min. UK/Italy/Belgium/France. Drama.

Bitter satire of the 60-year Arab-Israeli conflict, seen through Palestinian eyes. Early on, what the Zionists are doing to Palestinians are not dissimilar to what we've heard Nazis have done to them - but later as decades pass, the Palestinian community falls into submission and utter despair: the mute hopeless youth entertain themselves with petty activities such as karaoke, and the suicidal old cling on to their fossilized, idiotic logic on how to change things. The social correlates to people whose country has been "occupied" by a brutal force (such as in Iran), are more than a few. Beautiful cinematography.

(Favorite dialogue: The Israeli soldiers hold a gun to the Palestinian's head, telling him to count to ten while thinking to tell where the hidden guns are, before he blows his brains out. The Palestinian says: "Ten.")

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