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.
The Other Side of Hope.
Note: I’m on vacation at the moment and thus not checking email or social media. I’m still writing a little, though, because I feel better when I do.
I only have a few 2017 movies I missed and still want to catch, including Israel’s Oscar submission Foxtrot (which made the shortlist but not the final five), but since I’m traveling abroad at the moment a few films that haven’t been released digitally in the US are suddenly available to me. One of those is 2017’s The Other Side of Hope, a really weird-ass Finnish film with a stark message about humanism and the European migrant crisis along with some of the strangest cinematography and editing I’ve ever seen. And that’s before we even talk about the sushi scene.
The film is barely 95 minutes outside of the credits, and the two main characters Waldemar Wikström and Khaled Ali don’t even meet until about an hour into the story. Wikström is an unhappy, apparently affect-less shirt salesman who sells his entire stock, takes his winnings to an illegal poker room to grow them exponentially, and then invests the bulk of it in a failing restaurant with the most incompetent staff you could possibly imagine. Khaled is a Syrian refugee who first appears in a pile of soot or dirt, applies for asylum, and enters the Finnish refugee system, which is depicted here as arbitrary and capricious. It is only when Khaled’s application is denied that fate throws him into Wikström’s path and the dour restaurateur decides to help the Syrian try to stay in the country illegally and eventually be reunited with his missing sister.
The story itself is straightforward if a bit unrealistic at several points – especially anything around the restaurant, which can’t possibly exist with the three stooges running it, including the laziest cook on the planet, the dumbest doorman on the planet, and a waitress who might be the most competent of the three simply because she doesn’t do anything. It’s the way the film is shot that is so jarring; if I didn’t know this was the work of Finnish director Aki Kaurismäki, I would wonder if this was the work of a precocious film student. Kaurismäki, who also directed 2011’s Le Havre has said this will be his last film, has a quirky, minimalist visual style that isn’t much more expansive with dialogue, much of it delivered drily to the point of atonality. That makes the Wikström plot line kind of hard to appreciate until Khaled shows up, since the refugee story unfurls with more emotion, mostly from Khaled telling his own history since he before he left Aleppo and from the friendship he forges with fellow asylum seeker Mazdak. There are weird, lingering shots of still faces and background items. People line up to talk to each other as if in a marching band, and often speak to each other at an obtuse angle that looks completely unnatural, using a flat tone and rarely expressing any emotion – no one cries in the film, and no one laughs.
Once the two plots unite, however, the movie takes a sudden turn towards deadpan humor, some of it extremely funny – including the aforementioned sushi scene, as Wikström attempts to turn the failing eatery into a Japanese restaurant, with preposterous results – even as Khaled’s safety is in danger both from Finnish authorities and from a group of neo-Nazis who attack him more than once on the street. The Finnish people generally come off as kind and open in the movie, despite the few outright racists running around, while the government itself comes off as heartless and ineffectual. The encounter with Khaled seems to light a spark of humanity in Wikström, and maybe even in one of the other employees (not the cook, who appears unable to boil water), but any hope there might be in the film comes from individuals, not form the institutions that, in theory, exist to help such people who have found no help from anyone else.