Foxtrot (2017)

Directed by: Samuel Maoz | 114 minutes | drama | Actors: Lior Ashkenazi, Sarah Adler, Yonathon Shiray, Shira Haas, Yehuda Almagor, Ilia Grosz, Sabine Helstorff, Danny Isserles, Irit Kaplan, Imani Reiser, Karin Ugowski

Oranges and dead soldiers. According to filmmaker Samuel Maoz (winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival with ‘Lebanon’, 2009) this is his country Israel in four words. When his oldest daughter started high school, she often took a taxi because she was always late for the bus. “That cost us quite a bit of money, so one morning I got mad at her. “Just take the bus like everyone else,” I told her. And if she’d be late, she’d be late. Maybe she had to learn the hard way to get out of bed in time. Half an hour after she left, I saw on the news that a terrorist had blown himself up in line 5, her line. Dozens of people had died. I couldn’t reach her by phone because the network was congested. Half an hour later, thank God, she was back in the living room. She had missed the bus that had exploded. She saw him drive away and decided to wait for the next one. And then they say I’m lucky because I have daughters…”

The incident inspired Maoz to make his film ‘Foxtrot’ (2017), named after the dance we all make with our destiny. ‘Foxtrot’ is a compelling family tragedy that consists of three chapters in which that fate plays a crucial role. The odds of dying intentionally are as great as the odds of accidentally happening, we learn. The Feldman family receives a terrible news: their son Jonathan, who served in the Israeli army, has died. Mother Dafna (Sarah Adler) spontaneously crashes and is immediately administered a tranquilizer by the soldier who brings the bad news. Father Michael (Lior Ashkenazi) slams shut because of his suppressed anger. He is instructed to drink a glass of water every hour, against the shock, whether he is thirsty or not. A few hours later, the soldiers reappear at the Feldman home, only to begrudgingly admit that a blunder has been committed. A Jonathan Feldman has indeed died, but not the son of Dafna and Michael. It makes Michael even angrier than before: ‘My son was dead for five hours,’ he raves. Apparently people are quite careless with human lives in the army.

In the second chapter, the oppressive home of the Feldmans – and the stage-like setting – is exchanged for the surreal, desolate moonscape on the northern border where four young soldiers guard a roadblock. One of them turns out to be Jonathan Feldman (Yonatan Sharay). Maoz leaves us in the dark for a moment whether it is one Jonathan Feldman or the other. Are we looking at a flashback here or are we just moving to another location? To make it easy for the viewer, one of the boys also says at one point: ‘Everything you see here is an illusion’. The soldiers are bored to death in this deserted area. Hardly any cars pass by. They sometimes pick up the lever for a stray camel; an animal does no harm. But when a car with young Arabs comes by, they are so on edge that they react a bit too firmly to an unexpected event. With all its consequences.

In the third act, all the puzzle pieces come together. While the first chapter is mainly told from the perspective of Father Michael, and the second from Jonathan’s point of view, in the final piece we mainly look at the events from Dafna’s point of view. How do you deal with loss? All the aesthetics of the first two chapters are thrown overboard; It’s all about the emotions here. And they come in like a bomb. It’s a shame to give away the fork, but Maoz returns to the Feldmans’ apartment and shows how the tragedy of a nation’s collective pain and anger is passed on from father to son and from mother to daughter. It is a vicious circle of needless loss that is difficult to break. Symbolic is therefore the trailer of the four soldiers, which slowly sinks into the ground. Every day the boys roll a can of meat from one side to the other, and every day the can is faster on the other side: the world is out of balance – and every day it gets worse.

‘Foxtrot’ is much more than an uneasy look into the life of an average Israeli family dealing with loss and grief; this film shows how deeply ingrained death is in Israeli society. It all starts with Michael’s mother, an Auschwitz survivor. Given the complex history of the country and its people, there is a bizarre sense of approval and acceptance for a world in which the military is so assertive. While that without exception brings tragedy. Maoz made a strong triptych, in which all three chapters have their own tone and style, but which connect perfectly with each other. His brave, confrontational approach is straightforward and heartbreaking.