The Time that Remains: Chronicle of A Present Absentee tells the life story of Elia Suleiman, beginning with his father Fuad’s violent resistance to the founding of Israel in the late 1940s and ending with Suleiman as a grown man. Throughout his life Suleiman has witnessed transformations in the social and political reality of the Palestinian people. Resistance and resilience in various forms are major motifs in this film.
The movie begins and ends with Suleiman riding in a taxi in Israel. It is dark and rainy with occasional flashes of lightning. The Jewish Israeli taxi driver speaks on the phone to a colleague saying that he is lost. Suleiman doesn’t seem to know the way either. But both are stuck in this taxi, a taxi driving somewhere, but where it is going and where it is located at the present remains a mystery.
Capable of being extraordinarily intimate yet distant at the same time, The Time that Remains alternates between these two poles of narrative and technique. This creates a sense of how individual and collective identities and social realities are intertwined, demonstrating that while the individual cannot entirely transcend harsh realities, he can contest them.
Suleiman acknowledges that inevitably we all suffer from layers of entrapment: The Israelis in their unwillingness to confront the losses the creation of Israel entailed for the Palestinians, the Palestinians to perceive their own weaknesses and failures, and all of us in the existential trap of being human: a trap which Suleiman does not decry, but deftly illustrates. He does this with deadpan humor and always with an appreciation for the comic and the tragic, and the sometimes excruciating overlap of the two.
Is Suleiman suggesting that humor can make the unjust just? No. But it can be a salve and a source of personal liberation. His film is exquisitely sensitive to the possibilities and necessity of the continuum of protest and acceptance, silence and sound, action and stillness.
There is a scene which is both comic and poignant, illustrating this point. A Palestinian talks on his cell phone and crosses the street, back and forth. All this time just a few feet away the giant gun of an Israeli tank follows his every movement across the street, creaking, a stupid behemoth whose power is obscenely unnecessary and absurd, and which does not intimidate the Palestinian man in the least—he barely notices it.
There is also the scene of a choir of Arab-Israeli/Palestinian-Israeli children singing Israeli popular tunes and national songs—they sing beautifully and confidently, but the dissonance between their current reality and their choral championing of the young State of Israel is palpable. Although none look uncomfortable standing amid a sea of Israeli flags, it feels intensely awkward to watch them sing a song with so much emotional content that does not appear to reflect their own feelings and life circumstances.
The film synthesizes resistance to domination with accommodation—and these two are not always in tension, as both are necessary strategies of survival. The balance of the two and their qualities change with the passage of time and varying degrees of acceptance to the changes in Palestinian and Israeli society, politics and culture.
One is struck by the immense honesty of the film and the quiet confidence in which it unfurls. Suleiman appears at various junctures, always silent, a roving eye and inscrutable face that adds to the sense that even as he writes, directs, and acts in his own movie he is somewhat removed from the reality it depicts because every person is to some extent both an actor in his or her own life and a viewer of it from afar.
Tragedy and comedy and the sheer power of still, unvarnished observation collide and assert themselves, sometimes with defiance and self-consciousness, other times with a cool confidence. This deceptively casual quality can leave the viewer momentarily bewildered as to what Suleiman viscerally feels about the conflict and his status as a Palestinian citizen of Israel, simultaneously at home and homeless, “A present absentee.”
Although it is carefully stylized, The Time that Remains has almost none of the smug self-assurance to which such films too often succumb. It is not interested in itself, not trying to score points by being relentlessly ironic or emotionally cold, intellectualizing or making into a cinematic game serious moral matters with real world practical and emotional consequences.
This is a film as close to life as possible: complex and nuanced, with no easy heroes or arch villains. Emotions, ethics, perceptions—all are exposed from various angles, held up to the light, honored, mocked, interrogated, respected, coaxed out of their self-assuredness and self-righteousness.
Israeli soldiers are objects of hatred and fear but also of sexual attraction; Palestinians plant bombs and hurl stones but also rescue wounded Israelis. Indeed, it is Suleiman’s father, Fuad, the same man who planted bombs in defiance of Israel’s soldiers when the country was born and was a gunsmith committed to violent resistance, who goes as far as to risk his life to rescue an Israeli soldier. The two end up in a hospital room, they look at each other, and the soldier thanks him for rescuing him. Fuad also repeatedly comes to the aid of his mentally unstable neighbor, who periodically douses himself in kerosene and threatens to set himself alight. Only Fuad knows how to gingerly wrest the matches from him and put an end to his suicide attempts.
Categories matter much less to Suleiman than individual human beings—they are his interest. He does not give anyone the cheap luxury of a self-indulgent emotion, neither of self-grandeur or self-pity. In this way his movie making is both pitiless and extremely generous. Nothing goes unexposed; anything overly ideological and self-regarding gets invariably flayed by its own dogmatism and inconsistencies, by its juxtaposition with real life which is far less consistent and confident, far more crooked and in flux.
Suleiman has empathy for everyone and demands that same empathy for his characters from his audience. It is perhaps his empathy above all—his recognition of universal human vulnerability and fallibility that makes this movie so exceptional. There is a transcendent mood of loss in this film—it is an elegy for a Palestine that once existed, or perhaps never existed outside of a dreamed mythology—an ideal that Israelis ironically stoked through their own intentional state and culture building and which now is remembered through a lens of nostalgia. But certainly a society and a people that had its own organic existence and integrity, one which was shattered by the war that followed Israel’s independence and which has not recovered since.
Suleiman is scathing and merciless to all sides—at the beginning of the film he mocks an incompetent Arab soldier who, in his purported solidarity with the Palestinians does not know which way to march, and, pathetically alone, seems to think there’s still a war worth fighting when in reality the Israelis have already all but won.
In a scene that is repeated several times, adding to its comic character and Suleiman’s illustration of the absurdity inherent in the Arab-Israeli conflict, an Israeli jeep on security patrol keeps stopping Suleiman’s father and a friend as they fish. Each time the soldiers ask if the two have their ID, each time they answer in the affirmative, and each time the Israelis respond with a quick comment that they should enjoy their fishing or something to that effect. But the soldiers never leave the jeep to approach Fuad and his friend to inspect their IDs, and Fuad and his friend just go right on fishing.
There is no real tension or enmity in these scenes as much as a sense of arbitrary division between the individuals fishing and the individuals in the jeep. Both leave each other alone, both seem well ensconced in their own realities. You realize as you watch these scenes repeat themselves that whatever gulf divides Jews and Palestinian Israelis in Israel, it is actually far smaller than the darkness that envelops these moments and is only broken by the lights of the jeep and the vastness of the sea.
Tender, humane, mournful—indignant without the consumptive destructiveness of anger and hatred, there is a startling integrity to this film. In what is arguably the world’s most debated conflict whose media coverage is super saturated, Suleiman says something new without scoring points for one side or another. He tells his individual story and that of his family and his people, narrating the rich human capacity for resilience in the face of pain and injustice, without ever suggesting that to hear and see and respect his life story and perspective negates seeing and appreciating the humanity of the other people in this conflict.
The acting is uniformly excellent as is the cinematography, particularly the use of long takes and compositions that frame characters in ways that heighten the viewer’s perception of their private reality. This is especially true of a shot of Suleiman’s aging mother, to whom Suleiman returns to take care of as an adult. We see her sitting in Nazareth and wonder what memories and thoughts are flowing through her mind.
We see it also in the intensely beautiful view of what has already become the land of Israel politically, but remains for Suleiman’s father the land of Palestine, as he is bound up and thrown over a fence by Israeli soldiers in 1948 as punishment for his involvement in attacks against Israeli forces.
His body falls with a thud, the viewer does not see it as it falls behind a stone wall, but Palestine/Israel confronts the viewer and Suleiman’s love for the land and what it represents is acutely evident. We do not know if he is dead or alive but the land remains a witness.
The Time that Remains illustrates how loss need not lead to despondency, survival and the compromises it entails is not capitulation. Rather, in the most compromising situation, the dignity of a person and a people—even as it has been violated—can remain untouchable and beyond the boundaries of any external force, however potentially overwhelming and powerful.
And although Suleiman, in his holistic sensibility and tolerance for human flaws, desires, and indiscretions, failures and frustrations, in his refusal to polarize and champion one people over another, consciously rejects the arrogance, negligence, ignorance and violence of extremism he is in every sense a radical in the liberating humanism and moral maturity he brings to the screen.
Noam Schimmel - London-based researcher and human rights practitioner with extensive development experience in the field.
