The observer: "The Time That Remains"

It's been over a year now since Elia Suleiman's The Time That Remains (subtitle: Chronicle of a Present Absentee) premiered to some acclaim at Cannes, and you can see why its distributors thought it might struggle to find a foothold among UK audiences: its themes at first appear less universal than region-specific, and then very much personal. We open with the director himself sitting in the back of a cab heading we know not where; when flashflooding obliges the driver to make a U-turn, so too Suleiman begins to rewind in his head.

The bulk of the film, set out in a series of comic vignettes, is a history of the Suleiman family, from the Israeli invasion of their hometown Nazareth in 1947 to the present day. Sketches introduce us to the key characters within this household: the debonair, gunrunning father Fu'ad; his loving, nurturing wife; Aunt Olga, with her dodgy eyes and increasingly dotty mind; the family's alcoholic neighbour, whose idea of downtime is to douse his body with petrol and threaten to set himself alight; and little Elia himself, a precocious, inquisitive tyke with a head already firmly in the clouds, who's taken aside by his headmaster at one point for outing America as a colonialist force in class.

As a filmmaker, Suleiman has retained something of the dreamer and the joker about him: suggesting the invasion and subsequent occupation of the West Bank was an absurd and ill-founded (if deadly) endeavour, he keeps his camera at the same distance from the action as the cinema's slapstick pioneers, and thus presents us with history as pratfalls and sight gags. One woman rushes in to greet the invaders effusively, and is promptly shot for her troubles; a Palestinian dresses up his wife as a hitchhiking Israeli soldier to satisfy a fetish, only to see her picked up by another car; a resident of latter-day Nazareth takes a call on his mobile, oblivious to the tank parked directly behind him.

Such droll, deadpan follies are an acquired comic taste, and the lack of political and historical context Suleiman provides may be an issue for those of us with little to no grounding in Middle Eastern history. There is a kerfuffle over something over something called "bulgur" ("bulgur for taboule", the subtitles attempt to clarify), a substance of which I'd genuinely never heard. And in the absence of the expected onscreen graphics explaining when exactly these events are unfolding, we're left to parse subtle changes in decor and costume in a bid to spot the time shifts. Once you've negotiated these hurdles, however, the film proves ineffably human, displaying real warmth in its characterisation. Fu'ad has something of the Fantastic Mr. Fox about him: sporty, crafty, fine-haired, forever one step ahead of the authorities.

The Time That Remains is one of those rare films that gets better as it goes along, in part because Suleiman has such a lovely, thoughtful way of describing time, and of reconciling his past and present selves. At one point, Suleiman's camera watches (at a distance) the teenage Elia watching (from his own safe distance) the scuffles between Israeli and pro-Palestinian forces on the streets below, showing signs of the detached observer he was to become; this teenage Elia delivers the Arab papers to the three men entrenched outside the local pub, and - in a later incarnation - we find Suleiman occupying one of these seats himself, watching the young men of the world striding by. Those distributors need not have worried unduly: the moral of Suleiman's film, dedicated to the director's parents and with a cherishable remix of "Stayin' Alive" over the end credits, is that it happens to us all.

The Time That Remains opens at selected cinemas today.