Two from Cannes: Mezzo-Mezzo

It Must Be Heaven (Elia Suleiman, 2019)

In this corner, a film I didn't like quite as much as I expected to. Looking back, I believe that I have been less and less engaged in Elia Suleiman's overall project ever since 2002's Divine Intervention, which I consider to be his high-water mark. In that film, Suleiman's deadpan humor was marbled with streaks of genuine rage at the plight of the Palestinian people, so much so that the conclusion entailed a sort of terrorist superbabe who dispatched IDF thugs like Wonder Woman (who, ironically, is now Israeli herself). 

Understandably, Suleiman has not been able to sustain that anger over the years. It would have destroyed him, as an artist and as a human being. His approach to Palestinian identity is now a kind of mournful bemusement. At one point in Heaven, a film studies academic (conducting a James Lipton style Q&A) declares Suleiman the "perfect stranger," and the director means for it to sound both apposite and trite, a pithy summation of the condition of statelessness which, as experienced, is a quotidian soul-ache that ought not to be expressed so neatly.

As It Must Be Heaven charts the Suleiman "character" in his travels from Nazareth to Paris to New York and back home again, the film makes consistent use of this primary conceit. The filmmaker says only two short lines in the whole film, generally remaining silent and at the periphery of the action. He is globally sidelined, a universal spectator to a contemporary existence that cannot sort out its politics enough to give him a place. So, like an erstwhile Buster Keaton, or a "Where's Waldo?" everyman, Suleiman is depicted at the Louvre, Notre Dame, by the Seine, in Manhattan, and various places he "doesn't belong."

Even more so than with The Time That Remains, It Must Be Heaven makes such dogged use of this negative space that the film can seem like an empty shell, just a lot of dead time between self-contained comic setpieces. Those individual sequences, such as the ubiquitous 5-to-1 policing (with Segways and rollerblades), the battle for outdoor seating, or the complicated relationship with an errant sparrow, are all perfectly judged, and demonstrate what a distinct eye Suleiman has for the modern absurd. He's like a more populist, of-the-moment Otar Iosseliani. 

But there are stretches during which "Suleiman's" disengagement too closely mirrors our own. It is refreshing to see a director employ the "master shot" approach in such a frankly alienating way, not to orchestrate panoramic beauty or provide a grand historical tapestry, but to convey to the viewer that we, like the film's subject, are at a complete remove from what is on screen. Nevertheless, there is a sense that we're observing a terminus to the overall Suleiman Project. The title, in its ambiguity, suggests as much. "It must be heaven" could suggest a misguided response to being politically sidelined, as if to say, "it must be nice" not to have any responsibility for the mess we're in. (Yeah, powerlessness. It's awesome.) But it could also refer to the final scene, where Suleiman finds, if not resistance, at least the possibility of communal joy.

Young Ahmed (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, 2019)

In the opposite corner, a film I expected to vehemently dislike and actually thought wasn't so bad. From Cannes onward, the consensus was that the Dardennes' take on Islamic fundamentalism was the biggest misstep of their career, a film so blithely racist and misjudged that TIFF flat-out rejected it, a first for the duo. There is, of course, the question of whether the brothers are particularly qualified to explore such complex material, or to give it the necessary sensitivity to obviate the hint of Islamophobia that such a topic can raise, regardless of how it is approached. In other words, why these guys and this subject matter?

And having seen Young Ahmed, I can now say that there is an answer to that question. It is not entirely satisfactory, but neither is it anti-Muslim in any notable way. The Dardennes are European humanists through and through, and their conception of religious grace is shot through with their basic belief in certain universal verities: compassion, forgiveness, brother/ sisterhood, equality, and the like. In this regard, Young Ahmed treats Islam in the same way a film like The Son treats Christianity: as a set of philosophical beliefs that can either bring people closer together or drive them apart. The idea of a deity (and for the Dardennes, it is an idea) is only meaningful inasmuch as it brings peace and kindness into people's lives.

So Ahmed (Idir Ben Addi) is shown to us as a once-"normal" Arab-Belgian kid ("last week you played videogames!") until he comes under the influence of a jihadist imam (Othmane Moumen). Ahmed, who has a cousin who was a radical and appears to have died fighting for ISIL, is at an age where he craves structure and meaning, and the imam is there to provide it in the form of a fundamentalist reading of the Quran, complete with "the devout" vs. "the infidels." That latter category includes Ahmed's own mother (Claire Bodson), who has the occasional glass of wine, and his sister Yasmine (Cyra Lassman), who "dresses like a slut." (Ahmed thinks they should both be in hijabs.)

The plot of Young Ahmed focuses on the boy's perceived mission to murder his old teacher, Inès (Myriem Akheddiou) who is breaking tradition by teaching kids modern Arabic, using music and literature, and not just the old Arabic of the Quran. After Ahmed's first attempt at killing Inès, the imam abandons him to the juvenile justice system, where he tries to feign reformation in order to gain release, so he can try to kill Inès again. But in pretending to fit into a secular order, Ahmed finds that his resolve wavers, and he must figure out who he is and what he values.

The main problem with Young Ahmed is that, like most of the Dardennes' films, we don't get any internal psychology when it comes to the protagonist. We only understand Ahmed based on the choices he makes. This can be a revelatory cinematic method when it comes to a young, anxiety-ridden working class Belgian girl (Rosetta) or a junkie who makes unimaginable decisions based on his addiction (The Child). But Western media encourages us to think of radical Islamists as the unknowable Other, people without a psychology who act like members of a programmatic cult. Young Ahmed ends with a situation that provides its title character with a state of grace, one that both we and Ahmed could conceivably take as a sign that Allah is not in favor of his violent mission. 

But the film ends just when we might have the chance to learn who Ahmed actually is. The Dardennes' formal commitment to the unknowability of our fellow humans is a disservice here, which means that a lot of those critics are right. You can't assume that your style is applicable for any conceivable scenario, because some carry different weight.