Divine Intervention (dir. Elia Suleiman, 2002). The Palestinian filmmaker Elia Suleiman established himself as a gifted artist with an intuitive grasp of the medium in Divine Intervention. With distant, static shots that recall Tati for their poetry and Antonioni for their tragic emptiness, Elia Suleiman has created a haunting, funny, and touching film imbued with dark humor and surreal flourishes. The vague narrative slowly emerges from a series of pleasingly arranged vignettes that chronicle lives damaged by the situation in Palestine. Instead of pointing fingers or stooping to tired polemics, however, Divine Intervention offers a refreshingly nuanced perspective on a conflict that causes only pain to both sides involved yet nevertheless seems fated to never be resolved. A.
You, the Living (dir. Roy Andersson, 2007). These fifty vignettes, which play sort of like Monty Python on sedatives, form a mosaic that comes as close as any film I know to expressing the banal totality of human experience in postmodern European society. You, the Living is a loving catalog of all the meaningless, empty, absurd events of daily life, from private apocalypses to marital squabbles to dreams to annoying upstairs neighbors who insist upon practicing the tuba at night; it is a paean to the joy of accidental connections that give our lives a momentary illusion of purpose and the painful fact of loneliness (usually, though not always, a direct result of self-absorption) that insures the consistency of human experience. Musical interludes included. A.
