Foxtrot: The film that demands to be seen

CONTROVERSIAL and slammed by its government, this award-winning movie has finally been released in Australia. You will be enthralled.

THERE are two ways to experience the stunningly crafted Foxtrot.

One way is to watch it as an extraordinarily performed film about grief, loss and war — a more than satisfying drama.

The other is to dig into Foxtrot’s many metaphors, including its unmistakeable rage about the futility of war, and of the complex relationship between parents and their children.

The Israeli film has garnered controversy in its homeland but has won over critics and audiences all over the world, including a Grand Jury Prize win at the Venice Film Festival.

Structured in triptych, the film begins with Dafna Feldman (Sarah Adler) opening the door of her Tel Aviv apartment to find two soldiers. She faints, aware of the significance of that knock.

Her husband Michael (Lior Ashkenazi) stands to the side, shell-shocked, as the soldiers tell him his son Jonathan has been killed in action. Michael’s grief is palpable, his distress manifesting in different forms from stupor to howling pain.

A father’s rage

This first sequence takes place almost entirely within the Feldman’s upper-middle-class apartment. The space has almost as much a presence as the human characters with its disorienting geometric tiles and the off-kilter graphic print on the wall standing in for the Feldmans’ emotional abyss.

Ashkenazi is mesmerising to watch in these first 35 minutes, especially as he becomes increasingly frustrated at being “handled” by the military’s liaison soldiers with their officious manner and insistence that he drink a glass of water every hour.

The action then moves to the isolated checkpoint where Jonathan (Yonathan Shiray) was stationed with his unit of four men, wiling away their days with video games, telling stories and doing the foxtrot with a rifle as the dance partner. It recalls Claire Denis’ seminal Beau Travail, but a less intense, slackers version of it.

The landscape is at times beautiful with its pink sky, but it’s mostly muddy as the shipping container they live in starts to sink into the ground on one side — the allegory is unambiguous.

The last act, back in the Feldmans’ home, is less effective but Foxtrot has already left such an outsized impression that it’s easily forgiven.

Hypnotic dance sequence you can’t miss

Writer and director Samuel Moaz (Lebanon) has composed a film that questions every part of the Israeli military’s purpose and practice, evident in how Jonathan’s unit humiliates Palestinian border-crossers in small ways, or how the military liaison officers treat the grieving Feldmans.

It’s clear why Foxtrot was so contentious in Israel that it led to its Minister of Culture to hyperbolically decry it as practically traitorous.

Foxtrot is not melodramatic and there’s little sentimentality in the starkness and precision of how Moaz tells his story — its emotional impact doesn’t rely on prosaic manipulations or the swelling of some sacharrine score.

Unsettling, occasionally shocking but always fascinating, Foxtrot is one of those films that demands to be seen and remembered.

Rating: ★★★★½

Foxtrot is in cinemas from today.

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