An armored vehicle full of Israeli soldiers rolls up outside a trendy nightclub in the West Bank. "Citizens of Ramallah!" squawks the loudspeaker. "Curfew! Curfew!" The well-dressed young people in the club, a floor-to-ceiling glass block that seems wildly implausible in this setting, take absolutely no notice. The soldiers repeat their warning a second time and then a third. Since you're watching a movie by a Palestinian filmmaker, you might think you know where this is going -- a raid, a bombing, atrocity and death in one or both directions -- but you don't. After a few repetitions, the scratchy imprecation transforms from one thing to another, from a hostile invasion into a layer or sample on top of the techno-house beat pounding from the DJ's booth. The soldiers realize this too, and we glimpse them through the dim grated window, bopping their heads to the music and waiting for their cue.Elia Suleiman's beautiful film "The Time That Remains" is both a musical construction and a work more concerned with form, light, sound and music than with what its characters say or do. In other memorable scenes, we witness a major character dying (or falling asleep; it's not entirely clear) in the passenger seat of a car while an Arab pop song plays on the radio, and hear a heartbreaking karaoke version of "My Heart Will Go On," sung by a Filipina healthcare worker to an unconscious old lady and a cop. Stuff like this may frustrate viewers who expect an autobiographical movie from a Palestinian director (or an Arab Israeli director; pick your terms) to strike an ideological stance -- to express rage over the expulsion of Arab villagers, or contrition for terrorist attacks, or whatever.
Suleiman is not remotely interested in those kinds of positions, but as the scene I've just described should make clear, that doesn't mean he has nothing to say about the relationship between Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land. Arguably the whole movie is about that subject, as experienced by one middle-class Arab Christian family in Nazareth -- the hometown of That Guy, today a predominantly Arab city inside Israel -- but stripped bare of the vitriol or rhetoric that we've all heard a million times and that has lost the ability to convince anyone of anything.
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