Conflict irresolution

THE TIME THAT REMAINS: Directed by Elia Suleiman. Starring Elia Suleiman, Saleh Bakri, Leila Mouammar, Bilal Zidani Club, IFI, Dublin, 109 min

WE HAVE, over the past month, seen quite a few interesting films from Israel. Eyes Wide Openaddressed gay sex between orthodox Jews. Lebanontackled one of the area's nastiest conflicts. Now, Elia Suleiman, Palestinian director of the fabulous Divine Intervention,tackles the entire history of the state in a mordantly surreal comedy that is as happy to baffle as it is to elucidate.

The picture is framed by a sequence in which the director, a near-silent presence among the cast, takes a taxi from the airport. A storm closes in and he asks: “Where am I?” Where indeed? The film seeks to answer the question in five discrete sections. The first, set in 1948, begins with the mayor of Nazareth (wearing a Fez, significantly) signing an agreement with the new authorities.

Not all are so compliant. Fuad Suleiman (Saleh Bakri) elects to resist the regime and receives a savage beating for his efforts. In the second sequence we watch as Fuad’s son is severely reprimanded by his teachers for daring to refer to the Americans as “colonialist”. Where can he have heard such a thing?

Meanwhile, Fuad, older and calmer, goes on peculiar late-night fishing expeditions and attempts to placate his eccentric neighbour.

Diaries written by the director's dad inspired the film, but events have been so twisted and heightened that The Time that Remainscan hardly be regarded as conventionally autobiographical.

Using frequent repetition and much comic incongruity, the picture rather brilliantly conveys the sense of a country condemned to absurdity.

The camera – usually positioned square to the set’s back wall – rarely moves and the actors work impressively hard at doing as little as possible.

The result is a class of deadpan that gets funnier as it gets more sinister: watch as a tank turret, inadvertently aping an angry Dalek, spins in time to the movements of a blameless citizen. Suleiman has a singular voice that is worth treasuring.