Foxtrot (amazon • iTunes) was Israel’s submission for the 2017 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and made the December shortlist of nine titles, but didn’t advance to the short list of the final five nominees, with the honor eventually going to the Chilean film A Fantastic Woman. Foxtrot is now the eighth of the nine films I’ve seen – the Senegalese film Felicité is the exception – and wouldn’t have made my top five out of this set either. Its messages are powerful, its theme important, its symbolism fascinating, but it’s also jumbled thanks to a structure that breaks the film up into a disconnected short stories and doesn’t sufficiently arm the viewer for what’s coming or give enough context to much of what we see.
The film opens with a woman, Dafna, answering a knock at the door and immediately fainting upon seeing who’s there – two Israeli soldiers who, she correctly assumes, have come to tell her that her son has been killed on duty. Her husband, Michael, stands there impotently while the soldiers give his wife a sedative and carry her to a bed, and then gets the news himself and reacts in not too dissimilar fashion. This whole scene, with a grieving uncle and sister adding to the fray, goes on for a half an hour or so, until we find out the IDF screwed up: It’s the wrong Jonathan Feldman, and their son is actually still alive, after which Michael demands that the IDF bring him his son immediately, regardless of where he is or what he’s doing.
The action abruptly shifts to Jonathan’s side, where he and three other very young soldiers man a rural, ramshackle checkpoint, occasionally examining the ID’s of the few travelers to pass down their dusty road. It’s thankless, boring work, but eventually someone does show up and the boys incorrectly perceive a threat, which results in the deaths of the travelers, an IDF cover-up, and then the call for Jonathan to come home.
There’s a lot to unpack in Foxtrot, which was condemned by conservative forces in the Israeli government for its unflattering portrayal of the IDF. The film asks fundamental questions about the purpose of all of this security theater in Israel, and whether the country is sacrificing the lives of young people for little or no benefit. (The Palestinians themselves are merely props in the movie.) It also examines the weight of history, of what happens when we ignore our cultural heritage, and whether in this case MIchael has pushed his son to do something to satisfy his own weaknesses and insecurities.
The film practically overflows with symbolism, not least of which is the foxtrot itself, which appears as a dance and a word in several spots, and which Michael later explains as a dance where several steps never take you anywhere – you always end up back where you started. Mud appears repeatedly as a motif, both as something the soldiers can’t get rid of and a symbol of the futility of their attempts to make any progress, including the way the shipping container the boys have as their base is gradually sinking into the mire. Camels appear several times as well as a symbol for the absurdity of the fight against an enemy whose existence is known but prevalence is not.
The story, however, never coalesces into a coherent narrative, and the way that Michael and Dafna reconcile at the end – after Michael has seriously injured their dog by kicking it – was thoroughly unconvincing. (I don’t care what the reason is – if you can seriously injure an animal on purpose, I can’t even be friends with you, let alone married to you.) It feels like we’re getting two almost completely unconnected stories here, with the futility of the war the one thing that unifies them. It’s a better vehicle of metaphor than it is a functional movie.