This film was seen as part of the Virgin Media Dublin International Film Festival 2020. Given the high volumes of films being shown and the number of reviews to be written, these may end up being a bit shorter than usual reviews.
It Must Be Heaven offers a Chaplin-esque meditation on what it means to be “a citizen of the world,”, albeit filtered through a Palestinian lens.
Writer and director Elia Suleiman neatly divides his comedy into three acts. Playing himself, the veteran Palestian director journeys from Palestine in a bid to finance his latest movie. First, he visits Paris. Then, he visits New York. Along the way, he acts a silent and deadpan observers of the chaos of the world around him. Over the course of the film Suleiman only talks on a handful of occasions. Indeed, it would be handy enough to exorcise those sequences and reduce him to a classic silent film protagonist. However, the world buzzes around him.
So much of It Must Be Heaven is a purely observational film. Suleiman drifts idly from one scene to the next, always watching with mild bemusement as he steps into another story that is already in progress, often without any larger context: a father and son squabble across the balconies of their shared home, two brothers threaten a restaurant owner for serving wine in their sister’s food, a woman marches slowly and certainly from a well carrying two containers of water in a rather relaxed relay. Sometimes narratives reveal themselves through the act of looking, and sometimes they don’t. Such is life.
It Must Be Heaven seems more like a resigned sigh than a profound statement, a candid acknowledgement of how people are strange all over, even if some places offer their own unique brands of eccentricity.
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: dublin international film festival, elia suleiman, film, it must be heaven, Movie, non-review review, palestine, review | Leave a comment »