LESSON IN HISTORY IS HIJACKED BY POLITICS
The Entebbe raid in 1976 was a real-life thriller that involved hostages and Idi Amin. So why tackle the story with a PC agenda?
FOR those of us old enough to recall June 1976, the word ‘Entebbe’ uncorks a whole flagon of hazy memories. I can still remember Reginald Bosanquet or possibly Gordon Honeycombe — back in the days when TV newsreaders had far more interesting names than Edwards and Bruce — updating us solemnly over grainy footage of an Air France plane standing on the tarmac at Entebbe Airport in Uganda.
Flight 139 had been flying from Tel Aviv to Paris. At a stop in Athens, four hijackers boarded. Two were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine; the other two were Germans, members of a far-left terrorist group with links to the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang.
After storming the cockpit shortly after take-off, they forced the pilot to land in Libya, then flew on to Uganda, where that benighted country’s loopy president, Idi Amin, welcomed them warmly in person.
The hijackers moved all 248 people on board to an airport building, where they were divided, broadly speaking, into Jews and non-Jews.
After a few days, the non-Jews were permitted to leave. That left 94 hostages and 12 crew as bargaining chips in the hijackers’ demands.
If Israel refused to release a number of militant Palestinians from its jails, the hostages would be murdered. What happened next was extraordinary.
A week passed, during which, as publicists are fond of saying, the world held its breath. Then, 100 Israeli commandos flew 2,500 miles in transport planes, below radar detection, and stormed the airport building. They killed the hijackers and freed all but four of the hostages, who were fatally wounded in crossfire.
The only commando to fall in a rescue operation of staggering ambition and audacity, was the man who led them, Lt Col Yonatan Netanyahu.
His younger brother, Benjamin, who somehow had to reconcile his grief with great national rejoicing, later entered politics. Maybe you’ve heard of him.
It’s an incredible story, its every detail the stuff of which movies are made. And indeed, have been.
The starriest was Victory At Entebbe (1977), which featured Elizabeth Taylor, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster, no less. Even Anthony Hopkins and Richard Dreyfuss, a little further down the bill, must have been star-struck. The big names this time are Rosamund Pike and Daniel Bruhl. Interestingly enough, while all the stars back in 1977 played the leading Jewish protagonists, Pike and Bruhl are cast as the two Germans, Brigitte Kuhlmann and Wilfried Bose. They are the characters we get to know best, an ideologically-driven but almost comically hapless pair who want to ‘throw bombs into the consciousness of the masses’ yet are catastrophically out of their depth.
MAYBE this tilt of perspective says something about how, rightly or wrongly, perceptions of Israel have changed in 40 years, from plucky underdog to rabid aggressor?
Certainly, Brazilian director Jose Padilha’s film strains hard to establish motivation on the part of
the hijackers, giving them back stories and, in the case of the Palestinians, poignant and genuine grievances.
‘Operation Thunderbolt’, as it was known, might have been a remarkable Israeli triumph, but Jeremy Corbyn and his less desirable friends in the Labour Party can still safely organise a cinema outing.
For those with no political bias who just want a strong period thriller, the screen-writer, promisingly, is Gregory Burke, who scripted the 2014 edge-of-your-seat drama, ’71, set in Belfast at the height of the Troubles.
Unfortunately, Entebbe won’t nudge anyone towards the edge of their seat. In exploring the political bickering back in Israel as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) and his more hawkish Defence Minister Shimon Peres (Eddie Marsan) argue over the best course of action, the film somehow diminishes the rescue mission itself. It just isn’t that exciting. This is a surprise; after all, Padilha is one of the creators of the gripping Netflix series Narcos, about the drugs overlord Pablo Escobar.
That series deals very nimbly with language, incidentally, skipping comfortably between English and sub-titled Spanish.
But here, it’s as if Padilha couldn’t quite decide whether to have his characters speaking their own tongue, or English with foreign vowels. So he gives us bursts of both.
He makes some other curious decisions, too. His film opens with, and repeatedly revisits, an energetic modern dance routine by an Israeli troupe that includes one of the commando’s girlfriends.
It’s an arresting spectacle, for sure, but might as well sport the caption ‘metaphor’.
And then there’s the casting of Pike, a fine actress who has successfully shrugged off all attempts to typecast her as a classic English Rose, although I fear she might, as a German-accented revolutionary, be venturing too far in ze uzzer direction. Ultimately, Entebbe delivers a worthwhile history lesson. But as a thriller, it fails by a distance to be as nail-bitingly tense and dramatic as the event it chronicles. Love this film or loathe it —and my fellow critics and I were divided more or less equally at our preview screening — it is nothing if not original.
ADAPTED from a sci-fi short story by Neil Gaiman, the screechingly daft premise of How To Talk To Girls At Parties is that, in Croydon, in 1977, with teenagers into punk and their parents into the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, a group of aliens might land and, alongside the joyous bunting and furious graffiti, appear only slightly more outlandish than anyone else.
Among the punk-loving teens is Enn (Alex Sharp), who, on encountering the visitors from outer space at a house party, not unreasonably assumes them to be a religious cult, probably from California.
He falls in love with one of them, Zan (Elle Fanning), and a very peculiar courtship ensues.
She is as fascinated by The Clash and the Sex Pistols, and their angry adolescent followers, as he is by all things alien. She is also, in her way, just as much of a rebel.
Director and co-writer John Cameron Mitchell doesn’t even try to make any of this believable, which might be just as well.
Some of the acting is decidedly wobbly, but in the case of the punk queen played by none other than Nicole Kidman, it’s just the London accent that fails to convince. Otherwise, she’s rather glorious.
Matt Lucas and Ruth Wilson also pop up in minor roles, in a film which is more like a chaotic, extended dream sequence than a feature with anything as stultifyingly conventional as a narrative.
In that initial sharp division of opinion, I sided with the haters. Too much of the weirdness seems self-indulgent, less for the gratification of the audience than for that of the director and his cast.
So two stars for the film, but for sheer, mind-boggling originality, I’d have to bestow the full five.