Wednesday, October 2, 2019

Foxtrot (Israel, 2017)

In this film a family tragedy dramatizes the weakness of the besieged Israel’s strength. 
The paradox centers in the father, Michael, whose apparent stoicism under pressure conceals his profound guilt about a long-buried army death. As commander he let another jeep proceed before him, only to see it exploded by a landmine. Michael can’t forget his helplessness as he watched his comrades burned alive, screaming. This is the second generation of "survivor guilt." 
  Writer-director Samuel Maoz frames his narrative with the perspective of a jeep following an empty desert road.  The viewer is not identified in the pre-title sequence. At the end we see the trip is by son Jonathan. He has been summoned home as a reward to his parents for having suffered through the erroneous report of his death. (A different Jonathan Feldman was killed, i.e., a parallel repetition of this tragedy.) The scene and the film end on Jonathan’s fatal accident. Swerving to avoid a camel on the road, the jeep plunges off the road to destruction. The army honours the hapless victim as “fallen in the line of duty.” The framing shots suggest the story's ending is present in its beginning.
The narrative takes three quite different stages. In the first Michael and Dafna Feldman are informed that their son Jonathan has “fallen in the line of duty.” Dafna faints at the doorway sight of the army messengers. She knows what their message must be. This is the predicament of the continuing siege against Israel, which makes every citizen a soldier. Michael proceeds stiffly, manfully containing his grief. In his sensitivity every sound registers loud: his body hitting a bed, the dog hammering the door to get in. Numbed, Michael scalds his hand for feeling. In this scene Dafna seems weaker, he strong; this will be reversed.
As a hint of that false strength, his hollow stoicism, Michael kicks his dog -- for the temerity of still being alive. But the dog remains faithful, tentative in his returns but always coming back to him. Like Israeli citizens persisting under attack, Max the dog bears his pain and carries on. But like this family — and real Israelis, and Israel — the dog is silently bleeding within.
The Feldmans’ emotions — drugged and suppressed, respectively — contrast to the soldiers’ practiced efficiency. They set a beeper to go off hourly to remind Michael to drink a glass of water. They offer to help — to tell the friends and family, to arrange the funeral — so methodically that we know the Israeli predicament has thus regularized the report of a soldier’s death to his parents. And “There’s always a friend who plays the guitar.”  We don’t see the other Feldman family’s validated pain, but we can guess it. This is the normalization of loss —and we witness its psychological and moral cost.
Jonathan’s German grandmother, Michael’s mother, “understands everything and nothing.” She has her own vast blind spot. As strength can be weakness, knowledge can be ignorance. She registers the news of Jonathan’s supposed death but doesn’t grasp it. She calls Michael by his brother’s name, Avigdor. Her speaking German instead of Hebrew shows her rooted in her past.
  The characters’ disorder is imaged in the  background artworks. Dafna’s fainting reveals the drawing behind her, a large layering of black squares jumbling into the distance. The emblem of order and stability — the square — here expresses a vertiginous confusion.  As the art contrasts to the solid, vertical lines in the Feldmans’ interior design, it visualizes the family’s erupting emotions breaking their attempt at stability. To the same effect, the film often interrupts the direct shots with high angle views that set our secure perspectives aspin. Michael shown against a floor of geometric cubes is similarly dizzying and unstable. Michael’s den has another black and white abstract painting — a fuzzied horizon line that evokes an ECG.
  Michael loses even his strained composure when he learns his son is alive after all. He wants him sent home immediately, to   confirm his survival. In his emotional rollercoaster, the good news proves as hard to accommodate than the  terrible was. 
***
In contrast to the tragic tension of the first episode, the second presents the deadly monotony of Jonathan and his three comrades guarding a remote supply route. “I’m at the end of the world and there’s no reception,” Jonathan reports. Wi-fi rules. But not here. Their boredom is imaged in the salience accorded the insignificant. A lengthy closeup follows a screwdriver penetrating some unidentified mechanism. The men know their trailer is sinking because a can of their food rolls down the floor — one second faster each day. With nothing better to do, they time it.
     The establishing shot defines their situation: a crossing rail, a booth, a bunker, a rusted green van painted with a fading blonde. Jonathan’s secularity and sexual awakening are imaged in that washed out pinup girl. The station stuck in the empty desert seems absurd. A high angle shot makes the muddy landscape seem an abstract painting, a gritty, cluttered alternative to the Feldmans’ art.  
    A video game suggests the soldiers are living in suspended animation. Way out there they are “fighting a psychological war.” “What are we fighting here?” applies to their real life as well as to their game. The soldiers may themselves be playing roles in a drama beyond their awareness, as if filmed (which, of course, their characters are). As their lives seem sapped of logic and reality, they relate to a cartoon: “Roger Rabbit must have had a hell of a tool to get Jessica.”
      To pass the time Jonathan recalls his father’s “last bedtime story.” Michael broke the family tradition — passing the ancient family Bible on to the next generation of soldier — when he swapped it for a skin magazine (Bellboy), with a buxom cover beauty with Xed-out nipples. That is secularity. The X-ing signifies the tension between the desire and the ban. After the initial magazine is enjoyed by Michael’s friends, its pages are stuck together. A replacement issue becomes the new heritage. But the masturbation motif here will collect relevance when we turn to the metaphor of dance, solitary vs connected. 
     The combination of official power and empty time, the debilitating boredom, plays out in the four intrusions by “clients.”  A van full of boxed toys is allowed through, but relieved of a small mechanical robot. That patrols the road in false, low-angle heroism until it falls down, abandoned, a parody of the soldiers' predicament. 
The first couple are treated brusquely, then passed. Not so fortunate the second. The guards have the be-gowned woman and her suited man stand in the rain, humiliated, in their prolonged process. The guards ruin the couple’s evening out — because they can. The couple try to smile to each other, stoically, but the woman weeps. With power comes idle cruelty, with idleness a thirst for amusement.  
The gathering boredom and the guards’ increasing sense both of their power and their insecurity lead to the disaster of the fourth incident. Two young couples arrive in a car. In the backseat the two are snuggling happily. The driver and the front-passenger girl are sufficiently detached that she and Jonathan exchange glances of possible interest.  
But when an object falls out of the car a solider cries “grenade” and Jonathan machine guns the car. He kills all four. The “grenade” was a beer can, now bleeding into the mud. 
  The code “The rhino is in the puddle” summons a bulldozer to bury the car and its passengers. The crime is buried with the practiced efficiency the army showed in the opening scene. So, too, the firm commander: “War is war. In a war shit happens. What happens happens.” The case is closed before it is opened. 
       This scene provoked the Israeli government's angry rejection of the film. They denied they would bury such a terrible error. But this fiction does not pretend to literal truth. Still, in war shit happens. Also errors. Not all errors are advertised.  The point of this offending scene is the gathering danger of unchecked power, even if defensive. Unchecked, both the defensive soldiers' power and their insecurity grow. Hence the increasing seriousness across the scenes of their exchange with travellers. The Israelis' fear grows along with their swelling power.
       But if Jonathan escapes man’s justice, his absurd traffic accident en route home is absurd enough to seem divine justice.
***
Another animation bridges the second and third sections. This is the comic book Jonathan drew explaining his grandmother’s concentration camp experience and her breakdown after Michael’s traumatic experience. The last drawing is a cartoon of the bulldozer hoisting the evidence of Jonathan’s crime before its burial. He seems as haunted by his tragic incident as his father was by his. As Jonathan cartoons his father’s Last Bedtime Story, a coming of age ritual, he includes his own personal admission of responsibility.
  In the third section, the Feldmans’ brief relief is destroyed by word Michael has been killed en route home. As Dafna works her pomegranate seeds her hands seem bloodied by her son’s death. She blames Michael’s insistence upon their son’s return for his death. She reminisces about their marriage and her reluctance to have any children: “I remember thinking I was going to be happy.” Michael talked her out of an abortion. To him, having Jonathan was God’s proof He forgave him for his military accident. But now “The pain of not having him never goes away.”
       Then there is the absurdity of his death: “Why couldn’t he be dead when they first told us?” The brief hope made the tragedy worse. Now Dafna chafes at being with Michael, resenting his words, impatient with his “false strengths.” Her earlier sympathy for his demons has been exhausted.
The parents adopt Jonathan’s last drawing as an image of their marriage. Each sees themself as the hapless car, their partner as the bulldozer. But sharing a joint recovers their connection. They laugh at the ritualized funerals: “The national anthem Let’s not forget that.” Now they see their lost son as a “fallen” soldier ascended to the angels: “He’s probably partying right now, having a spiritual multiple orgasm.” That’s how daughter Alma finds them, giddily stoned: “You’re beautiful when you’re together.” 
And so to the title. “Foxtrot” is the code name for the outpost where Jonathan serves. As an emblem of liveliness, there’s a dance class at the seniors’ home where Michael visits his mother with the bad news. Five dancing couples are joined by a woman dancing alone, both freed and isolated. Her dance may be lyrical individuality or madness. For the couples' dance suggests the ritualization of possibly disruptive energies. As Jonathan demonstrates the dance to his comrades, he’s too spirited to stay with the foxtrot. He bursts into a comic mambo, sensually engaging his dance partner — his rifle. Like the earlier woman's lyrical solo, his sillier one contrasts to the couple or the communal dance — solitary, masturbatory, an unconstructive indulgence. 
  Michael and Dafna finally come together -- stoned -- and dance. As Michael describes the foxtrot, they take a step forward, a step sideways, then it’s back to their starting point. Instead of progress there’s stasis: “No matter where you go, you always end up at the same place.” The spirited foxtrot becomes a metaphor for quite the contrary: the hopeless ritual in which Israelis and Palestinians find themselves locked. Each side replays its own steps -- without either getting anywhere. In politics as in relationships, in the family, progress and growth depend upon reciprocal connections and advances. In politics as in sex, a partner improves the situation. Otherwise you have the masturbation of the sticky magazine and Jonathan's erotic dance with his rifle. 
  Michael and Dafna bury their losses and their differences when they slip into a close waltz, viscerally bridging their solitudes. But for besieged Israel there is no waltz, just that bitter, futile foxtrot, the compulsion of security: “No matter where you go, you always end up at the same place.”
       As Maoz makes his focus the Israeli response to the implicit Palestinian threat he doesn’t retell its history. The Palestinians here are themselves victims of the Palestinian assault against Israel — via Israels’ defensive measures. Instead Maoz focuses on the challenge to the Israelis’ moral compass. He’s examining the Israeli’s frozen foxtrot, not the Palestinians’. But the lesson holds for both partners not yet dancing together. As the exchange of glances between Jonathan and the doomed girl suggests, enemies should be screwing each other instead of trying to screw each other. 
      This film is an insightful, moving revelation. Its dramatic shifts in tone, with surprises and shock at every turn, make this an emotional roller-coaster. 
      But in framing out the Palestinian threat, the film may be read as suggesting that the regional problem derives from Israel’s moral compass. But under existential threat what alternative does Israel have to hard security measures? Of course, Israel can't control what the Palestinians do. They can only govern their own responses. Hence the drama's focus on Israel's practice, not their enemy's.
       Where are the Palestinian films that question the genocidal campaign that has for a century prevented their peaceful coexistence? After all, as with the proverbial tango, it takes two to foxtrot.
      Finally, credit to Maoz’s implicit revision of Chekov: A camel planted in Act 2 must prove fatal in Act 5. 



This 2017 Israeli film virtually swept the Israeli Film Academy Awards and won Best Film at the Athens, Capri, Macao, Luxembourg, Moscow Jewish ,Munich, Venice and Zagreb Film Festivals