European Cultural Studies in Favour of the Glorious Palestinian People, or "It Must Be Heaven"

Are you sure you really need to know everything about the hero, and the whole backstory of everyone else in the film?

You want to watch a life and feel what the characters feel, presumably. There's no point watching just to be watching — what would be the use.

The usual way of watching won't get you through Elia Suleiman's "It Must Be Heaven." People come and go. What becomes of them is mostly unknown, and has nothing to do with the man at the centre.

Which raises the question of whether he's a hero at all. What lesson is he meant to learn on his way to becoming better — and why shouldn't you be the one drawing that conclusion instead? That's the point at which making him an observer starts to pay off.

He's a Palestinian, no longer young, and he arrives in France. Things arrange themselves so that ordinary, faintly impossible events keep happening in front of him.

He barely touches them; they simply occur. Now and then he might step in and say something — but should he? That would start a chain of entirely legible consequences, and from there he'd be stuck acting out an arc already written for him.

So you can just watch. The world can turn 540 degrees around you — watch, and react.

Or take the reaction away altogether. What happens is enough on its own: unprompted, and yet rehearsed. Even the birds here fly on cue, and will keep you company if you need it.

Here you are reading this, and it may well be telling you about something that matters. Are you prepared to react, or is it enough to know it's the case?

Inaction in art is a trick of the light. What looks like absence is usually a question, carefully framed.

What the question turns out to be is your business. The film is only a quarter filled in — you're still directing this life, choosing which fragments to keep, where to cut, and what has to happen next.