23/05 - CANNES DAILY ON THE TIME THAT REMAINS

ENTERTAINMENT / CANNES FILM FESTIVAL / CANNES DAILY / 23/05 - CANNES DAILY ON THE TIME THAT REMAINS

23 May 2009 — Elia Suleiman's The Time that Remains, which premiered last night here at the Cannes Film Festival, opens with a taxi driver stuck in a rainstorm, asking himself some serious questions: "What am I going to do now?" and "How do I get home?". Such questions have obviously been bothering Palestinian director Elia Suleiman his whole life. Suleiman directed and acted in movies for 11 years in New York, and he has been a university professor in Jerusalem. His home? Well, Nazareth is where he was born in 1960. Nazareth is where his father took part in the Arab resistance that officially ceased when the city capitulated to Israeli army forces on June 16, 1948. And Nazareth is the primary setting for The Time that Remains, a funny, largely autobiographical film that shows Elia Suleiman (playing himself) trying to figure out what to do as he looks for the way back home.The Time that Remains is Suleiman's third film in a trilogy that includes Chronicle of a Disappearance (1996) and Divine Intervention (2002), and it's likely to win him a wider audience than those first two films (not to mention a prize in Cannes; we'll know tomorrow night). As a director, Suleiman has a light touch. Beginning in 1948 in Nazareth and winding up in present-day Ramallah, The Time that Remains was inspired by the diaries of Suleiman's father, Fuad Suleiman, and is dedicated to his memory — yet Elia Suleiman avoids the easy route. He never plays on our emotions. A scene in which the young Fuad Suleiman (Saleh Bakri) is beaten and left for dead by Israeli soldiers is handled as matter-of-factly as a later scene in which Fuad risks his own life to keep an Israeli soldier alive. No melodrama, no political grandstanding — just random moments that happen to people who feel as stuck as that taxi driver in the storm.When Elia Suleiman is on-screen, he is a cross between Jacques Tati and Napoleon Dynamite. He looks both befuddled and comprehending, an attitude that seems perfectly adapted to the absurd, irremediable situations he encounters. Suleiman (his character is listed as "E.S." in the credits) never utters a word during the film, but his silence speaks volumes. What is there to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that hasn't been said already? * * *When The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus was shown in Cannes last night, the clapping at the end went on and on. A lot of that applause was, understandably, for Heath Ledger, who died during the filming of Imaginarium, and for Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell who managed to pick up their departed friend's role and run with it. But we aimed a lot of our clapping at Terry Gilliam. He certainly overcame big odds to complete this movie on time, and that's what seems to have captured the interest of the press so far, but he also made a great movie, period. Imaginarium is the story Gilliam was born to show and tell. As one movie critic suggested to us today, special-effects technology seems to have finally caught up to what Terry Gilliam has had in his mind since his Monty Python days. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is hugely fun to watch, and it makes a convincing case for the importance of imagination. See this film, then see it again with the kids. — Randall KoralThis year NESPRESSO has Cannes covered, inside and out. Vincent Maraval gives us his take on the films his company, Wild Bunch, is screening during the festival ("Un Autre Regard", exclusively on NESPRESSO's website, daily at 6 p.m.). And Randall Koral, NESPRESSO's Cannes correspondent, serves up his impressions of the films and festivities as they happen ("Cannes Daily", 11 a.m. CET).