A homemade hand-painted poster
Ilya Suleiman, from Nazareth, Palestinian. Has been living in different countries. The 60-year-old Suleiman has directed only five films so far, each of which has been published for six or seven years, and "Must Be Heaven" is a work released in 19 years and won the Cannes Grand Jury Prize.
It's a very quiet movie, exaggerated to say a pantomime. Suleiman, who directs himself and plays himself, has only two lines in the 97-minute lead.
I love watching talkative movies, Woody Allen, Houmai, Richard Linklater. Listening to the protagonist's cannon, the words push the plot forward, and sometimes there is a sense of compactness that cannot keep up.
This is different, detached from the discourse system of language, very quiet, immersed in the environment and space, any slight sound and action can make a ripple.
But it is not a boring big boring film, and all kinds of small plots are staged in turn with cold humor.
The film adopts a non-linear narrative approach, a three-part structure, and the protagonist Suleiman is like a travel blogger today, wearing the iconic cross-body bag and straw hat. Wander around the cities of Nazareth, Paris, and New York, and gain insight into the people and things around you as a bystander.
The people and things that happen in the film do not have a sense of compactness, they are very loose, and it is the fragmented images that present a state of loose freedom and exude fun.
The uniqueness of the subject matter and the freshness of the form are the most attractive to me. This movie does not talk about love, does not talk about family, and does not have complicated character relationships.
The protagonist as an observer is already an audience identity, as a spectator, an expressionless outsider, from the perspective of the viewer to replace the immersion of the sense of emotion to remove the protagonist's aura.
Suleiman's frontal gaze is numerous, and a face is all raised by eyebrows to carry the performance flag. A pair of insightful eyes penetrate the screen, straight to the heart, revealing curiosity about things, very thick, simply cute and cute.
The photography is stylized strongly, the composition is exquisite, and the perfect symmetrical composition can rival Wes Anderson. The camera's viewpoint is the subjective viewpoint of the character, and the relationship between the lenses conveys the relationship between seeing and being seen.
The most classic passage is in the woods of Nazareth, where a woman wrapped in a white turban is separated by a row of small pine trees, and the woman walks forward with a basin filled with water on her head, and Suleiman follows her steps.
After a few small steps, she put one basin down and went back to get another, and Suleiman followed suit, unhurriedly, staring at the fluttering of her skirt.
The camera moves the camera position on the parallel line of the two lines of sight, starting from the viewpoint of seeing and being seen, slowly moving forward, feeling the sound of breathing that stops with the pace, the sound of cicadas under the hot sun, and the anxiety of the air.
Paris in the film is empty and clean, rarely inhabited, the tanks passing in front of the Bank of France, the sound of fighter jets flying across the sky above the Louvre, and the grand military parade played on the television.
When it comes to Palestine, the first reaction is the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and when it comes to the Middle East, all the symbols are deconstructed here, and the war factor is frequently present in the city of Paris, which is defined as romantic.
It's a comedy indeed. Black cleaners on the streets of Paris used cans for golf balls, brooms for clubs, and skillful swings to sweep them into the gutters and score goals. Smile at that.
The homeless people who slept on the streets were comforted by the rescue center and enjoyed a meal service attitude like Haidilao.
Two young men from Japan mistake the Palestinian on the streets of Paris for the Japanese they were looking for.
When did this comedy feel sad? Late at night on the streets of New York, in heavy rain, lights lit up in the city shining in the dark, Suleiman sat in a taxi.
The driver asked
Where did you come from
Suleiman
I'm from Nazareth, a Palestinian.
The two sentences he said throughout the movie are here, and the weight of these two sentences is like a large dark cloud pressing down on the environment, the rain crackling on the car window, in other places, for the question of identity, everything in front of you is plunged into darkness.
He seems to be a homeless wanderer, seeing social phenomena in different cultures, what is he looking for on the streets in Paris and New York? From the Middle East to Europe to the Americas. Is there any place in heaven?
In Nazareth, what they saw were neighbors who stole lemons, fathers and sons who cursed each other, brothers and sisters who wanted to eat the overlord's meal;
Paris has high-class rescue meals for homeless people, tattooed men who evade tickets in the subway, black cleaners who use cans as golf balls on the street, and brooms as clubs;
Everyone on the streets of New York carried a gun to the supermarket and even resisted the cannon. The United States, which shouts freedom and democracy, cannot tolerate the girl in the costume of liberation Palestine.
The construction of those laugh points seems sad, and the cruelty of those jokes is full of warmth.
The bird that accidentally flew into the room, Suleiman picked it up, stroked it, and gently placed it on the table, silently watching it drink water.
The strange man threw an unknown object suspected of being a dangerous goods under the car and quickly fled, and when the car moved away, he found that it was a bouquet of roses that had withered.
These seemingly dispensable idle pens do not want to reduce him to some deliberate political metaphor, but simply the warm beauty of simple life.