It Must Be Heaven (2019)

Directed by: Elia Suleiman | 102 minutes | comedy | Actors: Gael García Bernal, Ali Suliman, Stephen McHattie, Elia Suleiman, Grégoire Colin, Kwasi Songui, Holden Wong, Vincent Maraval, François Girard, Robert Higden, Gabrielle Mankiewicz

‘It Must Be Heaven’ begins with a group of Christian Arabs trying to enter a church in Nazareth. But that doesn’t go smoothly, just like nothing goes smoothly in this film by and with Elia Suleiman. The main character, a boyish man with an ever-wonderful look, fifties glasses and a straw hat, is the alter ego of Suleiman: a Palestinian filmmaker who watches the world in amazement. Who encounters the absurdity of life not only in his home city of Nazareth, but all over the world. In Paris, in New York or at home in Palestine, he sees human discomfort, ticking clocks in silent rooms and strange encounters.

The unusually centric framing – with his own figure always as a strange center – makes the scenes seem more and more surrealistic. There is hardly any talking, only observation. He recognizes his motherland – where, we are shown, he has learned to recognize the absurd in the everyday and the everyday in the absurd – in the absurdity of our society, in the appearances of authorities and more broadly, in the absurdity of a display of power in the general. This can also be an individual who acts aggressively in the metro or two childish machos who ‘protect’ their (adult) sister in a threatening tone. By mainly showing the absurdity in the moments of display of power, instead of the threat, Suleiman also takes the sting out of the situations. In any case, he himself is never afraid – he silently undergoes whatever comes his way; neither disturbed nor amused. But is it also the case that he ridicules the authorities in Paris and New York because it is relatively easy there? In his eyes, are the Parisian homeless so spoiled that the ambulance serves them a three-course dinner? We won’t know for sure.

We hardly ever get to know what keeps him busy. The calm undergoing of the situations, which therefore automatically become dryly comical, prevents him from showing the viewer more of himself. And that’s a shame sometimes. At first it seems as if he is cleaning up his apartment in Nazareth, in order to leave for good, but gradually this is not explored anywhere. He seems to go to Paris and New York mainly to pitch his film to producers – unfortunately unsuccessfully, because they find his ideas ‘not Palestinian’ enough, we see in wry but also witty conversations. The unrealistic expectations that people have with ‘a Palestinian’ are discussed more often – Suleiman subtly ridicules them, and sets them straight: for example, by showing how Palestinian young people dance with each other in a discotheque in Nazareth, just like everywhere else in the world. , drinking, smoking and flirting. And let that be the only situation in the entire film that doesn’t seem absurd, but just reassuring.