It Must be Heaven, Melancholy and Tribulations

The actors of It Muste Be Heaven around Elia Suleiman ©YesICannes.com

The last day of the Cannes Film Festival saw the screening of It Must be Heaven by Elia Suleiman (Israel) and Sybil by Justine Triet (France).

Virginie Eifira ©DR

Sybil, stories interlocking with one another

Sybil, Justine Triet’s third film, won the director (40 years) her first selection in Cannes official competition. In a thriller with psychoanalytical accents, mixing comedy and cruelty, Sybil (Virginie Efira), a novelist turned into a psychoanalyst, feeds her novel with the passionate dilemma of a patient, Margot (Adèle Exarchopoulos), an actress in distress. But, involuntarily, the novelist plunges back into the whirlwind of her past. In the second part, evoking all the emotional or sexual metaphors, the Stromboli serves as a backdrop to the explosion of the film and its stories interlocking with one another.

Elia Suleiman ©Carole Bethuel

It Must be Heaven, offbeat pieces

The filmmaker Elia Suleiman tells of It Must Be Heaven that it gives to see ordinary situations of the daily life of individuals living around the world in a climate of planetary geopolitical tensions. In the manner of Jacques Tati‘s Monsieur Hulot, Elia Suleiman in his own role, always in the middle of the screen without saying a word, contemplates on his tribulations a world that gives offbeat moments, in which, each times, the comedy situation is inviting itself. In an absurd burlesque, Elia leaves Nazareth for a desert Paris and an over-armed New York and lives scenes where he always finds his Palestine.

©Carole Bethuel

The whole world foreign country

If in his previous films, Palestine was like a microcosm of the world, It Must Be Heaven presents the world as a microcosm of Palestine. The airport becomes the checkpoint, the ubiquitous police is brocarded in ridiculous choreography where it focuses on details while ignoring the essence of its mission. The forces of repression are prowling: war planes, tanks, helicopter like giant drone… In New York, ordinary people are all armed, as many in Israel. The fireworks are not without evoking a duel of artillery…

©DR

Poetry of silence and standing ovation

In a poetry of silence, in front of the astonished gaze of the character, boater on his head and a bag on the shoulder, a hilarious and funny fable unfolds where the director recognizes his country in the prevailing security obsession. Policemen putting on binoculars in Nazareth, measuring a terrace in Paris, cops chasing an angel in Central Park. Without flinching, the character meditates on scenes with visual humor stigmatizing the absurdity of a world where violence is spreading.
The only comedy of the official selection, It Must Be Heaven forcefully sign the return of the 58-year-old filmmaker who returns for the third time in competition in Cannes where he won the 2002 Jury Prize for Divine Intervention. The festival-goers gave a long standing ovation to Elia Suleiman wearing the same hat he is wearing in the film.

The Festival is on YesICannes.com: yesicannes.com/category/festival-de-cannes