Cherien Dabis
Tutto quello che resta di te

This year in Venice, a good “handful” of films focused on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as their main theme. Rightly so: among other things, cinema has a duty to capture (and pause) reality. Two of these works particularly struck critics and audiences: "The Voice of Hind Rajab" by Kaouther Ben Hania (Silver Lion) and the film reviewed here, "All That Remains of You", by Cherien Dabis (her third feature film, at 48), a director, screenwriter, and (sometimes) actress born in Nebraska with Palestinian roots.

There are countless films about the ancient affairs of the Middle East, and yet, after Asghar Farhadi’s gentle revolution brought western styles, tones, and rhythms to a cinema so distant from us, these types of films seem more focused and, not a trivial thing, more understandable. And this one from Dabis seems to me deserving of a place among the best of its kind. Far removed from a certain documentary style (and a certain sluggish pace) that characterized the works of Amos Gitai or Jafar Panahi (I mention two at random, but they’re the most significant), this work feels like an American film, in both style and approach, “accidentally” set in Palestine, where you never feel the strain of a plot spanning from 1948 to 2022 nor the 145-minute runtime.

In short, it is a long and nearly epic family saga, starting with the first Israeli occupation of Jaffa in 1948, and thus the story of a Palestinian family forcibly stripped of their home and the land where their family’s orange grove stands; the father’s deportation and his eventual return to the family, after his loved ones flee to another city; we find ourselves in 1978, with the West Bank under occupation, the son grown and now a father himself (profession: elementary school teacher), the struggle to coexist with an aging father seemingly lost in memory and thought, and the Israeli army, as usual, brutally and sadistically controlling the town’s streets (the scene where a rifle is aimed at the father, followed by his little boy—not to kill him, but to humiliate him in front of his terrified son—is heart-stopping: you’ve been warned); in 1988 the son of our protagonist is now grown, twenty years old, hates the Israelis, and by chance participates in a demonstration for the Palestinian people, where he is struck by a bullet, falls into a coma, and dies. This is where a whole second film begins, grappling with profoundly moral themes, above all, that of organ donation, which—inexorably—could end up saving the life of an Israeli child. And this is what happens. We then arrive at the present day, in 2022, with the mother of the slain boy talking with Ari, a man she had once seen as a child and who now lives, as a Jew, with the heart of a Palestinian. A bitter yet poetic finale.

Originally conceived to be shot in the actual locations, due to the events in Gaza, it was filmed between Cyprus, Jordan, and Greece. Dabis tells a lengthy family saga against the backdrop of repeated, increasingly violent Israeli occupations of Palestinian land, but does so in a western cinematic tone, giving the film an unrelenting rhythm from start to finish, even where, inevitably, the final act slows down to focus on the loftier, more substantial themes of the work. Some sequences are anthology-worthy: beyond the aforementioned scene, there’s also the long stretch where the parents are asked for an endless number of forms in order for their injured son to undergo a CT scan at the hospital. It must be said, however, that the film especially surprises with the two different tonalities it assumes over its considerable length: the 1948 events are tragic but possess a historical truth that makes them almost philological; the 1978 storylines are even tinted with humor, thanks to the family patriarch, now a grandfather, who, in an effort to exorcise the imprisonment he suffered in his youth, instructs his grandson on the greatness of Palestine (and on the “maledetti figli di puttana” occupying it), diffusing every situation with a joke or a sarcastic remark; the events of 1988 are tragic, allowing no room for laughter, the lump in your throat seizes the viewer, forcing them to confront a reality we’d rather forget; 2022 is poetic, the season of old age, with the two seventy-something protagonists returning to Jaffa, finding it changed, revisiting his old house and, like in a Chaplinesque film, walking (as do their shadows) toward the sea, while a poem, frequently recited throughout the movie, recalls the magnificence of their homeland. Yet the director, even as she indicts the Israeli occupation, does not blame today’s Israelis, to whom, in the finale, she reminds that their pain (the Shoah) is also their pain, though perhaps, in some cases, this feeling does not appear to be mutual.

With an excellent cast and outstanding technical department, if anything, the film lacks a certain directorial “lightness” that makes it, at points, a bit weak narratively (and some sequences perhaps a bit too “commented on” by the otherwise soft background music), but between echoes of socially committed cinema (needed as much as ever these days) and references to other films (especially to Kurosawa’s “Ikiru”, 1952), there’s plenty of substance and very little filler: as stated, one of the finest films on a subject as delicate as it is essential today. The Western taste, which marries beautifully with the Eastern, is also plainly visible in some design choices: above all stands the opening image of the protagonist family’s home, with some Middle Eastern touches but looking more like a mock-ranch from the American westerns of the 1950s.

Unmissable, among the best released in recent years. And, ça va sans dire, to be enjoyed in the original language with Italian subtitles.