Let It Be Morning | Review
Juna Suleiman, Alex Bakri, and Samer Bisharat in Let It Be Morning
Exterminating Angels: Kolirin Gets Subversive in Soft Satire
By Nicholas Bell | Published on January 13, 2023
By the time we round the corner into the final act of Eran Kolirin’s fourth feature, Let It Be Morning, it’s beaten us into a sort of glazed submission, the kind of experience generating some variation on “if you’re not laughing, you’re crying.” Based on a 2006 novel by Palestinian writer Sayed Kashua (who also co-wrote a 2004 film titled Private with comparable themes regarding a family confined inside a home), the adaptation immediately straddles a precarious divide merely by being directed by Kolirin, a noted Israeli filmmaker (the cast boycotted the premiere out of the Un Certain Regard sidebar at the Cannes Film Festival due to it being advertised as an Israeli production). Some of its cultural vicissitudes, both externally and diegetically, eventually seem submerged by an apathetic tone established by a rather lukewarm collection of characters, whose pleasures, pains, desires and decisions swirl into a repetitive pattern as mundane as white bread. Although there’s nothing inherently wrong with the cast, there’s a lackadaisical overhang which sometimes feels like blunted cynicism in its presentation of these characters, who are both metaphorically and then literally subdued by their environment. We’ve become, perhaps, a bit too accustomed to sensationalism, yet Kolirin’s latest often feels like it's begging to be unleashed to deliver a more barbarous bite.
Sami (Alex Bakri) has returned to the small Arab village he’s from in Israel to attend his brother’s wedding. Upon leaving the event with his wife Mira (Juna Sulieman) and his preadolescent son, he’s stopped on the only road in and out of the village by a military roadblock. Turning around, they stay the night at his brother’s but the blockade shows no signs of going away, despite immediately quelled protesting by some of the villagers. Sami discovers he’s been fired from his well-paying tech job in Jerusalem after he doesn’t show up after two days, and apathy eventually sets in. His tensions with Mira lead to marital revelations and Sami eventually reunites with an old friend he’s been avoiding, who owes money to the town’s main goon, another ex-cohort of Sami’s. With the electricity shut off and no access to the outside world, food sources dwindle and bad behavior leads to the expulsion of a number of West Bank Palestinian workers who had been laboring in the village (including for Sami’s father) without permits, which the Israeli military seems hellbent on stopping.
Kolirin seems to be mixing elements of his previous features, such as the dysfunctional family in Beyond the Mountains and Hills (2016) and especially the claustrophobia and displacement in his 2007 breakout debut The Band’s Visit (which his latest seems like the upside down version of). A momentary flash of violence is all it takes to keep the smattering of initial protestors seemingly irrevocably in place, while the expected descent into chaos arrives whenever certain givens are removed from civilization. Through this impossible situation we’re stuffed into the banalities of Sami and Mira’s troubled marriage. He’s been cheating on her, natch, and she’s apparently well aware of it but still longs to rekindle their sex life. Sami’s pretentiousness eventually becomes whittled away by necessity, reuniting with Abed (Ehab Salami), an old comrade he’s actively been avoiding, who’s become, more or less, the village idiot. A joke about why the town’s main bully seemingly respects Sami revels in the sort of ambiguity much of Kolirin’s film is lacking, but it's bits like these which place Let It Be Morning in the same territory as Kafka and Bunuel.
Samuel Maoz’s Foxtrot (2017) might come to mind, but Let It Be Morning exists in a stagnant emotional void, a world stifled by the ennui of its main character, whose double lives are finally forced into the same space, only confirming the life he’s established for himself in Jerusalem is a different form of the same kind of internment. One desires something drastic to transpire, along the lines of Michel Franco's New Order (2020). Depressingly, an Arab community betrays the confidence of the Palestinians, whose presence has purportedly generated this makeshift martial law, which manages to feel subversive, though anemically, in its stating of the obvious paths of power demanded by unrestricted hierarchies. What appears in the film’s final moments on the outskirts of the town is grimly perceptive in showcasing how we allow terrible restrictions when we’ve experienced maltreatment, mistaking small freedoms for fairness.
★★1/2☆☆☆