A Palestinian acting lineage stars in this uneven but masterful film about the alienation that survival sometimes requires.
Image: Sundance Institute
Sherine Daibes All that’s left of you It is a morality tale in the guise of an epic family drama. Therein lies its surprising power, and perhaps its occasional awkwardness. Running 145 minutes, the film begins with a lively Palestinian teenager, Nour (Mohamed Abdel Rahman), confronting a demonstration on a West Bank street while playing with a friend sometime in 1988. He impulsively joins in, and when the shots start ringing we see him… He leans into a parked car, just as a bullet goes through the windshield. The boy does not appear again. Just as we begin to fear the worst, Daibes cuts to a close-up of Nour’s mother, Hanan (played by the director herself) as she addresses the camera, telling us that in order to understand what happened to her son, we must first understand what happened to his grandfather. We don’t get any context as to who, where, or why she says these words.
The film now returns to the year 1948, and we find ourselves in the life of a wealthy Palestinian family in Jaffa. The kind father Sharif (played by great Palestinian actor Adam Bakri) enjoys tending orange groves and teaching his young son, Salim (Salah El-Din Mai), to appreciate poetry. But the distant sounds of bombs and ominous news reports from elsewhere make it clear that their peaceful life is an illusion and that war will soon turn their reality upside down. Selim sends his wife (Maria Zureiq) and children away to safety, and stays behind to help negotiate the peace and also to monitor the orchards. He was quickly reduced to a withered shell of a man, forced to work menial jobs for the Israelis who had seized Jaffa from the British. Meanwhile, his family finds themselves in a refugee camp.
As the film progresses, we see the fate of this family in 1978, 1988 and beyond. For all the superficial sweep of the narrative, the drama focuses intently on these individuals; There is not much sense of life pulsing outside their walls. As a result, relationships can seem schematic and unsurprising; External characters only appear to make a point. This may be a result of limited resources and chaotic production. (It was molasses Preparing to film the film in Palestine When war broke out between Israel and Hamas and forced them to change their positions.) But the closed style also reflects the isolated nature of the characters. As they become consumed by war and displacement, their isolation increases.
And there is power in the sheer spectacle of time: the charismatic Sherif becomes an embittered and broken old man (now played by Mohamed Bakri, Adam’s equally brilliant father), still dreaming of his own orange groves. Salem, once lively, grows up to become a father himself (Saleh Bakri, Adam’s brother – one of the film’s main pleasures is the opportunity to witness this Palestinian acting breed), and it is his turn to be harassed and tortured by Israeli soldiers. As a stubborn young boy, Nour (played by Sanad Kabariti as a child) grows to resent his father for the man’s perceived weakness in the face of aggression. These historical events demonstrate the never-ending cycles of humiliation that Palestinians have had to suffer. They have an didactic charge: they feel more like anecdotes than a story, and despite their humanity, the members of this family can sometimes feel like pawns in the drama rather than fully realized characters.
But again, there’s purpose behind the seemingly simplistic quality of Daibes’ approach, and it actually pays off. As promised, the first half of the film, with its harrowing journey through the decades, turns out to be an introduction to the story of Nour’s teenage fate. (Those who are concerned about spoiling the narrative may want to tread carefully from now on.) When the film returns to its opening scenes, we learn that Nour has been shot in the head but is still alive, albeit unconscious. His parents, Salim and Hanan, rush to the hospital, but it turns out that the necessary medical technology is only available in Israel. The horrific bureaucracy involved in trying to transfer a sick Palestinian boy to an Israeli hospital for an urgent life-saving operation is another humiliation – and ultimately no less violent or serious than the abuse with which soldiers have meted out the other men in this family over the past three years. years.
Even so, the film still has its most surprising twists, as we eventually learn the sad context behind Hanan’s initial speech to the camera about Nour and his family history. The predictably infuriating nature of those earlier scenes has all been building up in these later clips, which now force this family into a heartbreaking and unexpected predicament. Finally, Daibis allows us to spend time with these people. In contrast to the history lessons in the first half of the film, the film’s final scenes All that’s left of you Get the quality of a simple local drama. Suddenly, these people come back to life before our eyes. It’s late, but welcome.
There’s a lot of melodramatic potential in this material – particularly the late narrative development that has led to the downfall of many talented performers in the past. (I won’t say what it is, but the title gives a hint.) This may explain why Dabies plays straight, and sometimes with a dead face. Even if the story demands it, giving in to raw emotion or tragedy can upset what turns out to be the film’s almost chemically precise structure.
Does it work? There are moments in this picture that may not seem emotionally real at first, where we might think to ourselves, The person in this case will behave differently. But that also seems to be the point. The behavior of the characters is itself a commentary on the numbness felt by people who have been brutalized in such a surreal way for so long. Far from the theatrics we might expect, this is a family that has learned to repress and contain, to accept painful things and bury them deep within themselves. All that’s left of you He’s not really looking for sympathy. Rather, it shows us, in its uneven and subtle way, the alienation that survival sometimes requires. In the end, I was destroyed.
