Back in 2009, one of the most notable names to appear on the world film scene was Samuel Maoz. The then-47-year-old filmmaker, a former documentarian, made his feature debut with “Lebanon,” a gripping war drama set entirely within a tank during the 1982 conflict between Israel and Lebanon, a conflict which Maoz himself had fought in, in a similar role. Despite Maoz’s first-timer status, it landed in competition at the 2009 Venice Film Festival and, furthermore, took the top prize, the Golden Lion, beating out films including “White Material,” “A Single Man” and “The Road.”
Maoz seemed likely to break out to a much wider audience, and yet, in the last eight years, he has been largely absent. It’s as if the Israeli director disappeared almost as soon as he arrived. Until this year’s Venice, that is, when his second feature, “Foxtrot,” premiered in competition, and again took another big award, the second-place Grand Jury Prize (only beaten to the top one by “The Shape Of Water”). And having caught up with the movie at the BFI London Film Festival this week, it became clear that the wait for a sophomore feature from Maoz was a worthwhile one.
To give away too many of the film’s surprises (and there are some massive ones) would be unfair, but in brief, the picture has a three-part structure. In the arresting opening shot, Daphna Feldman (Sarah Adler) opens the front door of her apartment and immediately faints. She’s seen a group of soldiers from the Israeli Defence Forces, and that can only mean one thing: her teenage son Jonathan (Yonatan Shiray) has been killed in action. While his wife is sedated, Daphna’s husband and Jonathan’s father, Michael (Lior Ashkenazi of “Big Bad Wolves” and “Footnote”) is officially given the bad news. Shattered, he begins the grieving process by kicking the family dog, before heading off to tell his dementia-suffering mother.
Later, in the second strand, we move somewhere to the north of Israel, where Jonathan is serving with three other young men on a roadblock. The container in which they live is slowly sinking into the dirt, and their days are pretty tedious: more often than not, they only have to raise the barrier for passing camels. And in the third, and final strand, we return to Michael and Daphna a year or so later, the stress of their ordeal having firmly taken its toll on their marriage.
“Lebanon” was an almost experiential film — intense, semi-documentary-like and claustrophobic — but “Foxtrot” is quite different as an absurdist, modernist picture. From that opening POV shot, half blackly comic, half shocking, Maoz plays fascinatingly with form, from a stunning twirling-camera shot to a brief animated segment that brings to life one of Jonathan’s notebooks, revealing that he’s a talented illustrator. Some of the most striking imagery of the year is found here, from a repeated shot of cycling birds to a glimpse of a toy robot setting down the long, empty road that the boys guard.
And yet it’s recognizably from the same filmmaker. It obviously shares the subject of Israeli men serving in the armed forces, again drawing on the director’s own experiences. But it also shares a perspective — a sort of fed-up frustration at the futility of the endless conflict, and the men and women lost to it on both sides.
It’s proved unsurprisingly unpopular with the right-wing Israeli government, and one truly shocking incident at the roadblock gives good reason why. But while it’s undeniably an anti-war movie, like “Lebanon,” and a political one, it’s more than anything about grief, and the cruelty of fate. The opening section is almost procedural-like in its detail: the calls that need to be made, the reminders of normal life still remaining after your life has been shattered (in one heartbreaking moment, Jonathan’s brother closes a window on his laptop detailing the death announcement to inadvertently reveal a desktop-backdrop picture of him with his own family), the dark comedy that might raise a smile on another day.
The second section examines guilt, while the third focuses on the longer-term ripples of loss and the possibility of recovery. And it does it with real humanity and compassion, allowing its characters to do terrible things and yet never condemning them (aided by impeccable performances, particularly from Ashkenazi and Adler, the latter of whom has less to do earlier on but shines in the third act).
It’s a film that can swing between absurdist humor and brutal gut-punch sadness in a way that’s rare and, at times, truly profound. There might be one twist of the knife too many in a way that feels a touch cruel, but otherwise, it’s a film deserving of the acclaim and awards it’s picked up so far. Hopefully, it just won’t be another eight years until we see more from its director. [A]
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