As we know from Synonyms and The Kindergarten Teacher, Nadav Lapid takes a harsh, cold view of contemporary Israel. Here the title connotes a single force for law and order. But the landscape is rather a fragmentation of the state. Its member groups, the family, even the individual, are at war with each other — and within themselves.
There are four main groups of Israelis here. At the top is the fat, spoiled business class, complacent in its power. When the rebels interrupt the wedding to take hostages, that power briefly seems threatened. It’s reasserted by the legal slaughter at the end.
Central figure Yaron leads the anti-terrorist special police unit. As he massages his pregnant wife he seems remarkably sensitive. But he’s ready to betray her with the inviting young waitress, at least until she reveals she’s under 16. His virtue is pragmatic.
His unit reeks of rampant masculine. There’s a trace of sabra idealism when the men cycle out to admire the desert beauty. But they are constantly physical, as in Yaron’s arrival at their party. The men slap and hug each other, relishing physical exchange. The party climaxes in a mass wrestle. It’s like they’re playing rugby without a ball. The skirmish is for its own sake, the exercise of the physical, that old devil “manliness.”
But even that unity is cracked. Yaron and the unit are under investigation for the wounding and killing of four civilians in an attack on a Most Wanted terrorist. As one comrade has cancer the unit has decided he should assume full responsibility for the transgression. Under their cold warmth he agrees. Even as Yaron massages his wife, she urges him to betray his friend to save himself. So even the feminine, the wife bearing a daughter, offers no check on macho unscrupulousness.
The police unit represents Israeli law and order, bent upon enforcing its traditional values. But in that earlier raid we hear about and in the climactic one we see, it is unprincipled brutality. The force exceeds the human need. Having forgotten its ideals, this unit is like the rugby game without a ball. The violence has lost its purpose.
At the opposite extreme, a gang of idle Israeli punks blithely destroy a parked car, heedless of the woman owner’s witness. This is the police unit’s destructive violence without the ideals that initially motivated the nation and their security forces. This is “pure” nihilism, destruction without purpose. There is no suggestion these are terrorists or even Arab. This is violence purely for its own sake, leaving rubble without a cause.
Between these outlaws and the cops fall the rebellious idealists. And they do.
This group is ideological, cultured, privileged. Shira is there not just because she loves the charismatic leader, Nathanael, but because she is passionate about returning Israel to its faded values. She’s a poet.
Another is an excellent violinist. But their idealism is soon undercut. There is egotism, not camaraderie, in the violinist’s humiliation of the beggar. So much for their egalitarian ideals.
Shira is naive when she calls on the police to recognize their kinship in even their oppression. They feel too much swagger to identify. She undercuts her own position when she turns on the voluntary hostage bride: "You are not a woman, but a bride. You have no face- you've got make up. You have no breasts, but perfectly fitted bra. You have no body - you have this dress. And this dress is exactly in the size of your personality.” So much for her call to a common oppression. In fact, the bride has proved arguably the film’s most courageous figure when she insists on staying with her father as hostage, begging for his release.
In reverse, a rebel’s father joins his son on the doomed mission. There’s no mother here, only the masculine. Himself a veteran of idealistic campaigns, the father initially locks up his son, to save him. When the lad threatens suicide the father relents, but goes with him to the fatal demonstration. Both are lost in the final sweep. Like the “family” police unit, the wedding family, and even Yaron’s ostensible fidelity, Israel’s fragmentation seeps down even to the family unit.
Of course, these young idealists don’t have a chance against the heavily armed and armoured police unit. The question is: Does Israel?
Perhaps the last shot presents some hope. Yaron looks down on the dying Shira and seems to pause to think. How we think he reacts probably reveals us more than him. Does he see her as his lost idealistic self? Does she remind him that Israel’s enemies are the genocidal terrorists, not Israeli Jews of however alien class? Does he see the daughter his wife is carrying? Or, more cynically, another lost waitress? Will he change or continue?
I respect and admire Lapid as a filmmaker. I object to his focus on Police Israel, exposng its institutionalized violence, but framing out the conditions that have caused it. Nowhere does Lapid acknowledge the state’s existential threat both from its neighbours and its fifth column citizenry. Lapid exposes Israel’s military focus but omits the dangers that require it. This judges Israel and not its genocidal enemies. Just this imbalance won Lapid’s Synonyms the Golden Bear at Berlin. Blaming Israel out of context is the popular thing to do. It’s easy.
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