Heavenly Cannes winner agem

It Must Be Heaven (PG, 97 mins) Directed by Elia Suleiman Reviewed by Graeme Tuckett ★★★★

In English and Arabic and French with English subtitles.

An extraordinarily dapper and well-preserved 60year-old gentleman by the name of Elia Suleiman lives in the city of Nazareth, in present-day Palestine.

Suleiman must travel to Paris and then to New York, where he is expected to deliver a lecture or two to an adoring forum of students and pro-palestinian supporters.

Suleiman is also trying to raise money for his latest projectwhich, we obliquely realise, might just be the actual film we are watching.

Obliquely is aword I thought of a lot as I reviewed It Must Be Heaven, Elia Suleiman’s fourth feature film and the winner of Best Film in Competition at the most recent Cannes Film Festival.

In recounting awildly fictionalised account of a few months in his own life, Suleiman grants himself a canvas on which to express any amount ofwhimsy and wonder at the modern world.

Suleiman himself barely speaks. He simply watches as the street, city and landscapes he observes play out their tender, intricate absurdities before him.

In an olive grove in Palestine, a woman carries two brass bowls across a field in away that would give a time-and-motion expert a heart attack but that looked full of tradition and wonder to me.

In Paris, police on Segways chase a suspect, before the pursuit devolves into a choreographed, mechanised ballet on the street below Suleiman’s apartment.

And in New York, a dream of a population who all carry guns turns into a rain-drenched journey from film school to film production office, with only a brief conversation with actor Gael Garcia Bernal – playing himself – to bring us back to Earth.

Suleiman is compared endlessly to Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati, and yes, the debt is clearly there.

But Suleiman’s motif is pure stillness, not the explosions of unrepeatable physical genius of his alleged mentors.

If you’re looking for amore relevant and accessible point of comparison to Suleiman, then I reckon you’ll see echoes in the films of Wes Anderson, Roy Andersson and Aki Kaurismaki.

Suleiman even has one character ask him, within this film, ‘‘does your style of film-making make you the perfect stranger?’’ to which he has no answer.

A little later, Garcia Bernal introduces Suleiman to anew York film financier with ‘‘he’s Palestinian, but he makes funny films’’.

Yes, yes he does. And also endlessly thoughtful, selfaware, reflective and achingly human ones. It Must Be Heaven is a gem.