Enigmatic, vibrant, pretty damn funny…sort of contains Tati and Godard in equal measure, with stretches that evoke the off-kilter incoherence of something like Made in USA alongside the deadpan absurdism of, say, Suleiman, stonefaced, wandering around his apartment in his pajamas while Israeli police “raid” it. The tableaus in this thing are consistently gorgeous and evocative, in addition to their comic potency; it all has a dreamlike tenor that threatens on occasion to boil over into something more foreboding but never does, with Suleiman’s interests lying not in the dramatic excesses which characterize depictions of Arab life indicted by Introduction to the End of an Argument but in those dimensions of life that are for more mundane and stilted. The result is a remarkable tapestry; imperfect, rhythmically off-center, but altogether pretty totemic.

Suleiman is fast becoming one of my favorite filmic employers of television and computer screens.