Foxtrot: The dream from which we can’t awake
“Foxtrot” is a haunting, poetic work of filmmaking that tells universal truths about the futility of war through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It is the second feature film from writer-director Samuel Maoz to receive wide acclaim and it has a rare small-city showing at the Film House in St. Catharines.
Before becoming a filmmaker, Maoz was a tank gunner in the Israeli army and his unit was one of the first deployed to Lebanon in 1982. In combat he took lives and was, as he describes, “the last person in the death link.” He has recounted the deep psychological scars of that experience and how moral choice vanishes in the battlefield, a place where survival instincts prevail.
Maoz’s first feature, “Lebanon” (2009), was pulled directly from his experiences in the tank. The film was made on a small budget and brought audiences into the claustrophobic interior of the vehicle, almost all of the film took place inside of it. Many likened “Lebanon” to “Das Boot,” the now classic 1981 film by Wolfgang Petersen about the lives of sailors on a Second World War U-boat. Lebanon collected acclaim and attracted controversy winning the Golden Lion at the 66th Venice Biennale after being rejected at Cannes.
The response to “Foxtrot” has been more of the same, after winning the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s Venice Film Festival it has stirred considerable dissension in Israel where the culture minister has denounced the film and lead official boycotts.
The political reaction belies the film’s power.
“Foxtrot” is elegantly composed in three distinct segments.
It begins as soldiers arrive at the affluent home of Dafna (Sarah Adler) and Michael Feldman (Lior Ashkenazi). They are bringing the news that their son has died in the line of duty. When the mother collapses she’s quickly attended to with a readied sedative while the father is methodically instructed on the course of funerary arrangements. The soldiers’ rote bureaucratic handling of the family’s tragedy makes plain how entrenched acceptance of their sacrifice is. The absurdity crests when a soldier informs that they’ve programmed Michael’s phone to chime once every hour to remind him to drink water during his grieving.
Maoz uses the disorienting shock of the news, its unreality to the minds of the characters, to create a dreamlike atmosphere that is maintained throughout the film. This is most profound in the second chapter that takes place at a remote desert checkpoint manned by four bored, young Israeli soldiers, one of them Dafna
and Michael’s son Jonathan.
Maoz has said he wants to take the audience “on a journey to the edge of the mind.” The scenes that he and his extraordinary cinematographer Giora Bejach create at the checkpoint reach that frontier. Exploiting the existential qualities of the desert and leveraging his experience as a set designer (the checkpoint features an abandoned ice-cream truck with a distinctly Americanlooking blonde pin-up in a permanently ecstatic state), Maoz invents a world that leads the audience into feeling as if they are sharing the same dream.
The third chapter of the film returns to the Daphna and Michael’s apartment. Here the film’s pivotal surprising twist is revealed.
“Foxtrot” is darkly comic, packed with metaphor, expertly acted and brilliantly executed. It is a story that could only be told on film and it uses all the power of the medium to probe deeply into philosophical and moral questions about existence and war.
It’s a film that will linger in your consciousness.
Foxtrot screens Friday at 9 p.m.; Saturday at 6:30 p.m.; Thursday, May 17, at 7 p.m.; Friday, May 18, at 9 p.m.; Saturday, May 19, at 9 p.m. and and Sunday, May 20, at 4 p.m.