Israeli film directors, being Israeli, have a lot of mucky cultural conflict at their disposal as potential material. But if you know the country’s films at all, you know that the national tendency is to whistle while walking briskly past the military graveyard.
Not so the case with the new film Foxtrot, an acidic portrait of modern Israeli-ness, the angry likes of which we haven’t seen since Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, in 2008. Samuel Maoz’s moody movie, his third, leaves you guessing its intentions scene by scene, but by the end you’re faced with a carefully etched portrayal of an absurd society eating itself alive.
Foxtrot is a deliberately ethnocentric film. Palestinians—although central to Israel’s nationalist/militarist Apartheid-esque knot of conflicts—are only occasional background here, vivid passersby barely acknowledged by the solipsistic Jewish family at the film’s center. We open in a mode resonant of Michael Haneke-style iced-blood Euro art films: a married couple, graybearded Michael (Lior Ashkenazi) and younger Daphna (Sarah Adler), receive news of their soldier son’s death.
Moaz shoots the action in frozen compositions that insist on your full attention. His control over composition and the spaces in that apartment – gray and modern and decked out with gratingly ugly art – is formidable, even when the film’s tone seems to edge toward the farcical. Indeed, the institutionalized manner in which the opening scene transpires—a detail of soldiers at the door equipped with sedatives, talking points, and canned placations—immediately feels almost satirical, as if Moaz was saying, “can you believe this?”
This is a movie about grief, but grief that’s run through the grinder of Israeli contradictions. Daphna passes out and is immediately sedated, leaving Michael alone to gulp water (the soldiers insist), and to watch as his son’s death is immediately co-opted by bureaucracy, by other family members, and by the Army clerk doling out instructions about the funeral that’s already been arranged. We’re suffocatingly close to Michael this whole time, so we’re shocked too—first act spoiler alert—when a second detail shows up just a few hours after the first, to inform him that it’d all been a mistake, their son is alive and well at a distant outpost.
Michael’s furious reaction is the first of a tragic fall of dominoes: he insists on his son being shipped home, right away. But then the film abruptly shifts into another gear, and we are with the son, Jonathan (Yonaton Shiray), stuck with three other bored inscriptees at a checkpoint in the armpit of nowhere. They sleep in a rusted storage container slowly sinking into mud, only opening their gate for a pacing camel, or the occasional late-night carload of Palestinians.
Moaz crafts an insidious invention from here, a kind of Rube Goldberg-machine look at the country’s predicament, stubbornly dedicated to converting suffering into Jewish middle-class privilege. It helps to see the film twice to grasp its unsettling tone. It’s half sardonic and amused, but sand-blasted by bloodshed and nihilism and secretly buried bodies—often in the same scene, or the same shot. Moaz stays too close to his characters to judge them. His critique falls on the entire cultural program, and does it so thoroughly that the Palestinians we do see (dressed for evenings out, humiliated by the checkpoint hassle on the lonely night road) don’t have to say a word.
Moaz crafts an insidious invention, a kind of Rube Goldberg-machine look at the country’s predicament, stubbornly dedicated to converting suffering into Jewish middle-class privilege.
The actors, with the camera right in their breathing space, are indelible and mysterious. Ashkenazi, with his basset hound eyes, is the picture of lost manhood; his character reveals streaks of sadistic rage we never come to understand. The willowy Adler, a French-born, Israel-based veteran of Jean-Luc Godard and Sofia Coppola films, has a fierce rot-in-hell gaze, and in the film’s scraped-knuckle third act, her Daphna becomes the personification of Israeli modernity in the era of Bibi: self-destructive, embittered by powerlessness, and grasping at memories.
In the end, Foxtrot (named after the soldiers’ checkpoint) finally cuts its grief with generational guilt. What we get to know about the son Jonathan, from his own accounting and his comic-style drawings, is dominated by an unease about the world he’s inheriting. It’s a terribly prescient vibe for 2018, no matter where you live.
Michael Atkinson writes regularly for The Village Voice, In These Times, and Sight & Sound as well as The Progressive. His newest book is the novel Hemingway Cutthroat (St. Martin’s).