Every film, no matter how many characters present in the film have different views or perspectives, are inseparable from the director's intentions, so the most critical thing to influence a film is often the director's point of view and vision.
The 60-year-old director has sharpened a sword for ten years, re-experienced the human world with an incomparably clear vision, and his hidden machine heart has been exhausted, and everything that should have been transformed into an old god is in the clouds.
Palestinian director Ilya Suleiman from the northern Israeli city of Nazareth won the Cannes Film Festival Jury "Special Recognition" Award and the International Film Critics Berlin Fabisi Award for her masterpiece "Must Be Paradise" in 2019.
The title of the Chinese "Must Be Heaven" is quite apt to the content of the film, but the name clearly has some intention: to remind the audience of the classic 1953 comedy "Monsieur Hulot's Holiday" by French director Jacques Tati.
In addition to the difference in the release time of the two films by more than one koku, the two films do have a lot in common, and it is inevitable to compare:
Ilya Suleiman and Jacques Tati both like to write and direct themselves, both with the actor's body movements and the special design of the plot, scenes or props to produce comedic effects, while deliberately reducing dialogue and reducing the drama of the narrative.
And the biggest similarity between them is why people are compared to them. I think it's their vision of reality that's almost as primitive and innocent.
But since the film can be traced back to the time of Jacques Tati, it is inevitable to go back to the classic comedians of film history before that. Such as Charles Spencer Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd and even Max Lind.
These great comedians of the silent film era have continued to develop a tradition of burlesque comedy based on body gestures and expressions; however, it is only by going back to this tradition of film history comedy that people can realize that in fact, Ilya Suleiman is not on such a lineage.
The point is that Jacques Tati has both inherited and pioneered this tradition, and the biggest common denominator between Ilya and Jacques is the part of the latter's pioneering, that is, to reflect a certain absurd modernity with a simple vision that is close to the pre-modern.
The fundamental difference between Elias and Jacques is why he is not classified in the latter's tradition of comedy: Jacques still actively participates in reality by becoming a character in his own slight clumsiness.
Ilya, on the other hand, remains a naïve spectator, does not participate, does not interact, and even if the reality around him is forced to come forward, he still does not react or move. But although he hardly moves or says much, he must be in the camera, keep himself present from beginning to end, and let the audience see his position, such a deliberate arrangement actually makes him more "careful" than Jacques.
Ilya himself is in the film, but unlike Woody Allen, who is chattering in his own film, or even completely speechless, but this does not prevent the director from expressing his own views, in fact, the director plays the role of an outsider audience from beginning to end, but from the point of view that all scenes are deliberately chosen, all actions are specially designed, and all actors are temporary, the director still schedules all elements off-camera.
Ilya's presence does not intervene, but the spectators are scheming, because he cares more about whether the audience sees him or not.
To illustrate Ilya's machination, another director had to be brought in to make a comparison.
Also using a one-shot, one-shot, each segment is individually established, and Ilya Suleiman also has similarities with Swedish director Loy Anderson, who also made "About Infinity" in 2019 and won the Silver Lion Award for Best Director at the Venice Film Festival that year.
The difference between the two directors is that when highlighting the absurd reality, Ilya Suleiman's attitude is more optimistic, while Roy Anderson is more compassionate.
"Must Be Heaven" maintains a fairly clear narrative line to some extent: the director stayed in his hometown for a while, then went to Paris, and then to New York, in order to raise funds for a new film, and finally failed, and could only return to his hometown;
"About Infinity" is a jump between reality and historical scenes, only a few actors have different scenes, the plot is related, Roy Anderson said that he was inspired by the fairy tale "One Thousand and One Nights", but his creation and shooting methods have been consistent since the previous films, and he does not need to enter the camera to perform a role.
Looking through the camera is a more complex way of looking. Neither director is good at making road movies, so they are completely different from urban observation, road observation, and even anthropological observation.
Roy Anderson is more like a shot of a life moment, although most of them are also spectator shots, or let the actors face the camera to make statements.
But occasionally it reveals a god perspective, similar to the german director Wim Wenders's "Under the Berlin Sky" shows the kind of "even open the sky to see the red dust, the poor body is the person in the eyes" mood. However, the image style of the two is far away;
Ilya has always maintained the identity of others and watched the surroundings, as if she had just come to the world outside her hometown, maintained a simple childlike heart for everything in other cultures, and was extremely surprised by the people around her, sometimes even her relatives in her hometown, and the so-called "moment on earth" was fundamentally different from Roy Anderson.
However, Ilya Suleiman did not start out this way, and his early Palestine Trilogy had previously been screened at prestigious film festivals:
In 1996, "The Chronicle of the Lost Civilization" photographed the style paintings of his hometown, family and even his people in Nazareth and the ideological origins in his works;
2002's "God's Intervention" sharply satirizes all kinds of absurdities and strangeness of the Israeli-Palestinian border, and conjures up a variety of Suleiman rhapsody;
2009's "Time Remains" remembers his own upbringing and brings it to the tragic struggles of his fathers' generation of Palestinians against Israel.
After these trilogies, the director, who is actually nearly sixty years old, only launched this new work ten years after "Time Remains", but he did not expect to be rejuvenated, revisiting the human world with an incomparably clear and transparent vision, and the heart of his containment was a thousand sails, and everything should have been turned into a cloud of smoke, and the philosophy of life contained in it was traceable since the "Palestine Trilogy".
No matter how much Ilya hid it before, his films always make people aware of the various boundaries, after all, in the areas under the control of the Israeli military and police, various access control posts, checkpoints, borders, and walls have become the daily routine of contemporary Palestinians.
However, in this film, the director comes from Nazareth to Paris and New York, not only to cross national borders, but also to face the boundaries of colored races and cultures, in addition to the boundaries of history, religion, language, and the boundaries of modernity and the future, and even the boundaries of life and death...
In the face of all these boundaries, the director does not move, does not react, neither criticizes nor ridicules, just watches expressionlessly, but the eyes are always bright and transparent; and remember that the director went to New York to raise funds for a new film, and the new title of the new film "Heaven Can Wait" can be the same name as the 1978 Warren Beatty self-directed comedy "Wrong Heaven And Wrong Birth", and the female producer turned a blind eye to him.
Later he found a tarot fortune teller, only to hear the fortune teller murmur, "Yes, yes, it must be Palestine." At first glance, it sounds for no reason and is so nonsensical, but it is actually echoing the English title of this film, "it must be heaven", which means that where heaven is, it is in Palestine, so the director went back.
At the beginning of the film, the neighbor is invading the door to harvest the lemons in the director's yard, and even if it is not big enough, he came to help him prune the branches and leaves three times and twice to water and take care of it, and the director planted a branch before leaving for France, and when he returned, he saw that this branch had grown into a small tree.
This not only echoes the original meaning of his hometown of Nazareth, but also indirectly shows his tolerant attitude towards the boundaries of the land; moreover, Nazareth is the original hometown of the Virgin Mary, although Jesus was born in the Manger of Bethlehem, he grew up here, and although the lemon cuttings are not miraculous, they still have the metaphorical role of the true heaven here.
All these are complicated to say, but the image is simple and clean, as for the other neighbor telling him the story of the python repaying the favor, when he returns home, he fights with his son and almost breaks;
And the director in the wild to watch a woman alone to draw two large tanks of water home, the water tank has no handle, the woman does not push the cart, how to transport water on the long way? This is the wisdom of ancient peoples — another line between pre-modern and modern.
I think of the Film of the same name by British theatre director Peter Brooke, who has Russian roots, adapted from the original book of the Central Asian philosopher Gulteyev, "Encounter with strange peoples", which is full of the wisdom and philosophy of life of the Peoples of Central and West Asia, and Ilya Suleiman has been immersed in this region and culture since childhood, and must have already realized the way of heaven, and "Must Be Heaven" is the best proof.