All That’s Left of You Isn’t Looking for Just Empathy

Cherien Dabis’s All That’s Left of You is a moral fable in the guise of an epic family drama. Therein lies its surprising power and, maybe, its occasional awkwardness. Stretching across 145 minutes, the film opens with a spirited Palestinian teen, Noor (Mohammad Abed Elrahman), as he runs into a West Bank street protest while playing with a friend sometime in 1988. He impulsively joins in, and when shots start ringing out, we see him duck inside a parked car — right as a bullet goes into the windshield. The boy doesn’t re-emerge. As we start to fear the worst, Dabis cuts to a close-up of Noor’s mom, Hanan (played by the director herself) as she addresses the camera, telling us that in order to understand what happened to her son, we must first understand what happened to his grandfather. We get no context as to whom, or where, or why she’s saying these words.

Now, the film flashes back to 1948, and we find ourselves in the life of a well-to-do Palestinian family in Jaffa. The well-read, kindly father Sharif (played by the great Palestinian actor Adam Bakri) enjoys tending to his orange groves and teaching his young son Salim (Salah Aldeen Mai) to appreciate poetry. But the sounds of bombs in the distance and ominous news reports from elsewhere make it clear that their peaceful life is an illusion and that war will soon upend their reality. Sending his wife (Maria Zreik) and children away to safety, Salim stays behind to help negotiate a peace and also to keep an eye on the groves. Soon enough, he’s a withered husk of a man, forced to work menial jobs for the Israelis who’ve taken Jaffa over from the British. His family, meanwhile, finds itself in a refugee camp.

As the movie proceeds, we see the fate of this family in 1978, and 1988, and beyond. For all the surface sweep of the narrative, the drama centers intently on these individuals; there’s not much sense of life throbbing beyond their walls. As a result, the relationships can feel schematic, unsurprising; outside characters only ever pop in to illustrate a point. This might be a function of limited resources and a chaotic production. (Dabis was preparing to shoot the film in Palestine when the Israel-Hamas war broke out and forced her to change locations.) But the closed-off style also reflects the cloistered nature of the characters. As war and displacement consume them, their isolation grows.

And there’s power in the sheer spectacle of time: The charismatic Sharif becomes an old, embittered, broken man (now played by Mohammad Bakri, Adam’s equally accomplished father), still dreaming of his orange groves. The once-vivacious Salim grows up to be a father himself (Saleh Bakri, Adam’s brother — one of the movie’s chief pleasures is the chance to watch this Palestinian acting dynasty), and his turn comes to be harassed and tormented by Israeli soldiers. As a headstrong young boy, Noor (played as a child by Sanad Alkabarete) grows to resent his own father for the man’s perceived weakness in the face of aggression. These historical episodes demonstrate the never-ending cycles of humiliation Palestinians have had to suffer. They have a didactic charge: They feel more like anecdotes than a story, and for all their humanity, the members of this family can at times feel like pawns in a drama rather than fully realized characters.

But again, there is purpose behind the seemingly simplistic quality of Dabis’s approach, and it actually pays off. As promised, the first half of the movie, with its grim journey through the decades, turns out to be a prologue to the story of the teenage Noor’s fate. (Those worried about the narrative being spoiled might want to tread carefully from here on out.) When the film returns to its opening scenes, we learn that Noor has been shot in the head but is still alive, albeit unconscious. His parents, Salim and Hanan, rush to the hospital, but it turns out the necessary medical technology is available only in Israel. The harrowing bureaucracy involved in trying to transfer a sick Palestinian child to an Israeli hospital for an urgent, life-saving operation is yet another humiliation — one ultimately no less violent or consequential than the abuse dealt by soldiers to the other men of this family over the years.

Even then, the film has more surprising moves left in it, as we eventually learn the sad context behind Hanan’s initial address to the camera about Noor and the history of his family. The predictably infuriating nature of those earlier scenes have all been building to these later passages, which now force this family into a heartbreaking and unexpected quandary. And finally, Dabis does allow us to spend time with these people. Contrasting with the history lessons of the film’s first half, the final scenes of All That’s Left of You take on the quality of an understated domestic drama. Suddenly, these people come to life before our eyes. It is belated, but welcome.

There’s a lot of melodramatic potential in this material — particularly one late-breaking narrative development that has felled many talented artists in the past. (I won’t say what it is, but the title offers a hint.) This might explain why Dabis plays it all so straight, at times stone-faced. Even if the story demands it, giving into sentimentality or full-throated tragedy could upset what turns out to be the film’s almost chemically precise structure.

Does it work? There are moments in this picture that may not at first ring true emotionally, where we might think to ourselves, A person in this situation would act differently. But that seems to be the point, too. The characters’ demeanor is itself a comment on the numbness felt by people who’ve been brutalized in such surreal fashion for so long. Far from the bellowing histrionics we might expect, this is a family that has learned to suppress and contain, to take painful things and bury them deep within themselves. All That’s Left of You isn’t really looking for empathy. Rather, in its own uneven but artful way, it shows us the alienation that survival sometimes requires. By the end, I was destroyed.