"The Palestinians as a state of being."
In fact, in "Must Be Heaven", what surrounds all "watching" and preceding "watching" but can only be established on "watching" is actually "the alienation of existence". And this "existential alienation" is precisely in harmony with humor, comedy in the form and content, and it can even be said that the director creates a kind of humor that belongs to the Palestinians, and re-expands the possible meaning of humor.
Stills from "Must Be Heaven"
In this film, Ilya Suleiman is through the lens of watching all the time, let us realize that the picture in front of us is presented under the "viewing", and then produce a "strange feeling" of the picture, get rid of our habitual understanding, and give birth to a kind of fun.
But in this, in fact, the core is not only to make the audience realize that "they are watching", so that they have a "strange feeling about the content of the viewing", so that the picture in front of them overflows with meaning that cannot be felt normally. Throughout the film, the subject of the viewing ultimately refers not to the audience, but to the director himself as a "Palestinian". Thus this strangeness rises into a sense of alienation from the world's spectators, and is a "sense of existential alienation."
The two-layered structure from "audience/strangeness" to "director/alienation" is not only expressed in the picture, but also in the way "speech" is handled in this film.
First of all, it's obvious that director Ilya Suleiman is silent throughout the film, and the only scene where he speaks his lines is when he gets into a taxi and the taxi driver asks him where he's coming from, and Suleiman says, "Nazareth, for the first time and only time." The taxi driver didn't react at first, didn't hear that there was a "Nazarene", and then Suleiman changed his name to saying that he was a "Palestinian".
Hannah Arendt once said in The Condition of Man: "Words and deeds reveal this unique specificity. Through them, people are different from each other, not just disticted; they are the patterns by which human beings present themselves to each other." "In action and speech, people reveal who they are, actively reveal their unique personal identity, and manifest itself in the human world... From all his words and deeds, one reveals that one is "who"—qualities, talents, talents, and shortcomings that he may want to show off or hide—and is different from "what." Verbal action defines the uniqueness of one's own existence, and "name" is often the meaning of "oneself as oneself" in various texts. Therefore, the "name" in "The Hidden Girl" will be taken away, and the search for the "name" is a symbol of retrieving one's own unique existence in mythology.
So when Chihiro called out the name of the white dragon, the "essence" of the white dragon was unfolded. And the words "call me by your name" are even more telling: "Only the reason why you exist can you evoke the reason why I am my existence."
Returning to the design of the whole film "lack of words", for the various pictures that are viewed, this design makes the proposition of "watching before words" established in the process of being watched in the film, so that the audience can feel the strangeness of the picture without being defined by the words of the observer. And because these images are unfamiliar, and not interpreted by our usual words, we can directly experience the funny behind some situations that we "take for granted" in general.
But further, the lack of words in turn refers to the audience's feelings about the director Suleiman himself walking, living, sitting, lying down, lack of verbal performance Ilya Suleiman like a mime actor, using his body language to show his various reactions, such performance not only allows his own body effect to transcend the boundaries of language differences, but also because of how the body reacts, in fact, it also reveals (and responds) to society's expectations for our discipline and social roles. Suleiman's calm body makes the characters in the situation seem absurd due to the lack of interactive objects, and the "natural" structure is destroyed.
But in the end, these point to the "alienation from the situation" reflected in Suleiman's own calm reaction. That is to say, the funny in the screen actually reflects Suleiman's alienation from these situations, the displacement that cannot be defined, and everything is funny because it is unfamiliar and not belonging.
And this is precisely the only time the director has made self-referentials to himself in the whole film with words: "I am a Nazareth" and "I am a Palestinian". The director's verbal and non-verbal words are combined on this level, pointing to the "existence" of the "Palestinians" as a "alienated" tone.
"You're not making enough 'Palestine.'" "He's making a comedy about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict." In France and the United States, he met with the producers, but encountered obstacles everywhere, and went to the United States to participate in a seminar on the theme of Palestinians, in which "Palestine" became a rare animal, representing a certain marginal, minority symbol of this society, and satisfying the imagination of "rare, unique, and voices that must be valued". And they themselves seem to have to respond to this imagination and come together to establish their own subjectivity.
Either "hostility" or "attention", in fact, everyone projects an imagination about Palestine on him in the process. In the face of these reactions, Suleiman in the film does not say a word, such a reaction not only makes him feel like a container in the film, allowing all kinds of imagination thrown from everywhere, but also, as mentioned earlier, his non-reaction makes this otherwise "natural" interpersonal interaction crack, Suleiman's "no catch" makes these reactions refer to themselves, so that the audience can look back and feel the behavior of the speakers "throwing out the imagination" itself.
Throughout the film, Suleiman not only rethinks the various landscapes he encounters through "he is watching" and "his minimal reactions", but also reflects the omnipresent "being watched" through his minimal reactions, reflecting the omnipresent view of "watching" from others.
But perhaps, on the third level, this "undefinable self" has always come from Suleiman himself, his own undefinable feeling of existence. The almost unresponsive, helpless, witty, and even mildly playful expression reflects not even Suleiman's disdain for this treatment, but his inability to be an "existential stranger." He allows those people to fill in the imaginations, but he also does not have any "roots" to refute those imaginations. As a result, on the dialectical level, his almost unresponsive behavior of seeming resistance becomes another level of silent acceptance.
Suleiman once said that this time he hopes to be able to move what happens in Palestine to the world. In fact, this sentence is not so much the discovery of Palestinian-like "objective events" in various parts of the world, but rather the perspective of the Palestinians as a state of existence in the whole world, which once again infects the world with a nostalgia of various veins of twisting, various identity dislocations and re-fighting.
In fact, in terms of life experience, Suleiman spends more time in Paris, and his hometown of Palestine is a place of multiple veins. Identity in Palestine is so complicated and tangled, but Suleiman is like a foreigner in that land. I once read a book called The Shadow of the Galilee, which is an adaptation of the story of the Gospels in the Bible, but the book is not narrated by the deeds of Jesus, but through the paraphrasing of the various groups in Nazareth at that time about watching Jesus and interacting with Jesus, with the interaction between these groups as the main axis.
As the novel progresses, jesus' face can be said to be more and more vague, but also more and more abundant, he promotes reconciliation between groups, but also causes conflicts between groups, all because Jesus is a being who wanders between various boundaries, and even becomes an unknowable shadow.
"Nazareth" Jesus, "I am from Nazareth" Suleiman said that the land of Nazareth, like Jesus, could not be defined, but because of the inability to define, it led to the destruction of boundaries, and the consequent communion, conflict and reconciliation.
That's why I say that the director creates a kind of humor that "belongs to the Palestinians." The comedic and humorous tone of "Must Be Heaven" is based on Suleiman's own state of existence, creating a "Palestinian" humor around the world, a kind of humor belonging to Suleiman, who re-uses his own existence to develop the semantic meaning of "humor". Suleiman, who cannot define himself in existence, and Suleiman, who wanders around various boundaries, can his existence be brought back, even to the Chinese audience to re-imagine the boundary breaking, blending and reconciliation?
In the final scene, the director watches the young man immersed in the dance floor, although he is not involved, it is another viewing, but his whole person is shrouded in electronic music. I personally love electronic music, which seems to say that all sounds can become music. When the various sounds are collaged together, they are removed from the context of the general use, allowing us to re-imagine the possibility of this sound. Fans who are no strangers to Suleiman will know that Suleiman's works also often use electronic music as a symbol of youthful vitality, a dynamic for new possibilities to arise. Electronic music seems to tell that even if the conflict between different veins is "dumb and ugly", it is possible to weave beautiful patterns under the new veins.
In the land of his birth, in the vitality of rebirth, Suleiman seems to have rediscovered the hometown he had always hoped for.
"It Must Be Heaven," "Because He is our peace, he unites the two into one and tears down the wall of the middle partition" (the Bible, Ephesians). Heaven is a kingdom that abolishes wrongs and enmity, and is the eternal home. Is this paradise? Is it heaven there? In fact, this is heaven.