Beaufort (2007)

Though the predominant effect in Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort (2007) is claustrophobic dread and futility, the film is enlivened by telling details.

Two visitors frame the narrative, the soldier sent to defuse a road bomb and the soldier sent to blow-up the Beaufort bunker, to leave nothing to Hizbollah. One item that survives the explosion is the metal sheet listing the soldiers killed in the original — and apparently unnecessary — battle to win the castle. Whatever the war does it can’t undo the loss of its soldiers’ lives, nor their memory. The project to blow up the bunker is called Back to the Future. The dynamiter imagines a soldier returning to that landscape and pointing out, amid the revived Edenic greenery, where the old bunker and its parts once stood. But won't the land remain as scarred as the soldiers? This paradise once lost can't be regained. You can't undo a war, at least not in the individual soldier. 

The remote officers’ disconnect from the soldiers recurs. The bomb-defuser is killed by a land mine near his target. His father on TV regrets never having taught his son fear, to preserve himself for his loving family. But the soldier knew fear. He originally resolved the bomb was too dangerous to approach. His commander overruled him, sending him to an unnecessary death. Indeed, the road is paved over anyway, so the fatal defusing attempt was unnecessary. With Hezbollah threatening to slaughter the remaining soldiers and their fort wired to explode, the remote commanders still order the battalion to remain there another night. As the loyal bomb sniffing dog is considered “a weapon,” so are the soldiers reduced to impersonal weapons to the distant command.

The film hints at the life these men could rather be living. When the first visitor gives a soldier some liquorice from Holland — not kid stuff but salty, strong — Cedar holds for over 10 seconds on the soldier inexpressively enjoying it. Like the white soccer ball that redundantly appears in a photo pose with the soldiers who brought the explosives, it’s a reminder of the joys these men could and should be living rather than fulfilling a dubious mission beyond their country’s borders. So, too, when the soldiers joke about one man’s American girlfriend, another soldier appears illuminated in the doorway behind, stripped to his shorts, a fleshly image of the flesh denied. The men’s bleak situation admits glimpses of the life outside. 

So, too, the film is drained of colour. Much is black and white, like the old American trench films of the Korean War, much in sepia, with occasional flashes of colour to remind us that these men’s lives have been reduced in their palette.

We don’t see any enemy. We hear their missiles and see their terrible effects, but we don’t see them. Nor does Cedar present any of the reasons why Israel went into Lebanon in 1982, e.g., to drive back the PLO that had been firing into Israel, the hope of working through to a peace treaty with Lebanon, etc. The enemy and the reasons for the war thus seem irrelevant. As a character stated in Time of Favour, Cedar’s point is that in war one fights oneself more than an enemy. In both films the characters’ alienation and misery play out amid the welcoming of the sabbath, a paradoxical discord.

When our heroes finally do escape they are welcomed by troops in a row of trucks that evoke our older images of the concentration camp trains. But now the Jewish soldiers are no longer victims to the outside world — but to their own commanders. The new Jew, the Israeli Jew, is a rugged, often blond, assertive force, antithetic to the traditional shrinking victim. In the bomb sniffer the Jews run their own German shepherd.

The hero, the young battalion commander, lives up to his reputation for character, virtue and judgment. By refusing to violate his instructions to remain in danger an extra night, by fulfilling his mission, he redeems himself for earlier having frozen, unable to run out to retrieve a wounded comrade. This brave leader, then, learned fear but also learned to overcome it. 

In the last shot he has stripped off his layers of armour and clothing and kneels in the road, weeping. He’s home at last, free at last, but behind him slightly out of focus the horizon line is actually a barbed wire fence still sealing him off. This is, after all, Israel, where whatever principle you espouse, whatever ideal you advance, you’re still a nation threatened with annihilation by every neighbour around — and a good many citizens within. Maybe you can’t afford your ideals — but you can’t afford to lose them.
    Like any historic fiction, Beaufort is not primarily about the time in which it is set (Israel, 2000) but about the time in which it is made (Israel, 2007). Like the best, however, it's equally effective as a reflection of the time in which the film is viewed. The wasting of the noblest lives in warfare, the fatal folly of undertaking to claim and defend outposts beyond your borders, the pathetic destructiveness of a bunker mentality — these themes still speak to audiences not just in Israel but well beyond. As in his visit to the planned attack on Temple Mount in Time of Favour and his critique of the early settlers movement in Campfire, Cedar proves Aristotle’s subordination of history — which records what happened merely once — to fiction — which discovers recurrent truths everywhere and always. Wherever there is the urge to war there will be a Beaufort. And oh, what a waste of heroes.