+Eagles (Nevelot)

Eagles (Nevelot) -- Israel, 2012, 104 min.

Director Dror +Sabo turns two old cranks, veterans of the 1948 war, into self-righteous killers. Ephraim and Moshka have been best friends since those heady days of the war for independence. Their bond survived their rivalry for the mysterious beauty, Tamara, the enchanting concentration camp survivor. Both men claim to have rejected her in order to sustain their solidarity. Now the once wiry idealists have turned into fat cynics. To the new Israel they are either ridiculous or invisible.

Unknown to the men, Tamara has moved back to Israel from America. Ephraim finds she has been killed in a car accident in front of their favourite cafe. The sight stirs up memories of the men’s competitive romance and the purity of their old war.

The geezers’  first murder is of two brash young men -- images of their old selves  -- as they cavort with a girlfriend on the beach. As one of the men comes at them with a knife, that could be self-defense. Ephraim then kills the man he says ran over Tamara, though his guilt is uncertain. The ostensible “heroes” then whack a mischievous neighbor and a girl who parked her car cavalierly.  At first the men profess to want to recover the purity of their idealized Israel, to remove the present debasement. But their killings increasingly are unjust rather than principled. This turn costs the two grumpy old men our initial sympathy and support.

Climactically Moshka kills Tamara’s daughter, who has been looking for him under the assumption he’s her father. Flashbacks reveal that the two sworn best friends  have been lying to each other about their relationship to Tamara.  The 1948 ethos, then, has been compromised even between these “heroes,” in addition to its improper application to contemporary Israel. The daughter's murder is a kind of self-destruction, which a nation bent upon an obsolete ethos also risks. 

The eagles of the title are an emblem of the men’s heroic pretensions. When the young soldier Ephraim saves Moshka, the company’s corpses attract some circling eagles. The men hope the eagles will see they’re alive but the sniper assumes they’re dead. Their present actions redefine the once soaring spirits as vile predators, especially when the doomed Tamara’s daughter has birds tattooed on her arm, emblems of her and her mother’s spirited natures. The eagle, of course, was also the emblem of the Nazi state, which further shades the two erstwhile heroes' murder on whim of whomever they dislike.

Like the classic postwar American noir, this film deals with death and psychological darkness while trenchantly reflecting on its time and national culture. As a warning of the dangers of valourizing the past, this film makes an important contribution to the current political debates in Israel.  How pertinent to  modern Israel are the strategies and heroes of 1948? Is Israel aiming high or low in sustaining old positions?      
       Full disclosure: I admire and respect this film but I disagree with its politics. Making the champions of 1948 Israel deluded, selfish killers ignores the several ways in which Israel would do well to return to that lost character. Contemporary Israel with its self-serving, corrupt government officials, its burgeoning vicious orthodox extremists, the fragmentation of the originally unified national spirit, would do well to revive those lost values. 

       The film was part of the strong Israeli contingent at this year's +Palm Springs International Film Festival.