A docudrama about two young Israeli men who help evacuate the wounded from the battlefield and at the end are themselves hurt when their helicopter is downed.
That's about it for the plot.
The film is aesthetically ambitious though. It thrives on its imagery. I haven't seen so many looooong and static shots since Hitchcock's experiments in the late 1940s. Even Ozu would be weirded out by these exhausting scenes during which, for most of the time, nothing much is happening. Men shout over the noise of the battlefield and slog through the mud from one place to another place that's ten feet away. Even after the credits, when we see a man and woman rolling around and having sex on a bed splashed with paints of different colors, the scene goes on and on and on while a saxophone ululates a little mournfully behind them. It's no more erotic than the shifting textures of the loving couple in "Hiroshima, mon Amour." A bit of the background of the two men is sketched in, but not much, so we can't really identify with them. The only other soldier I was able to distinguish was the doctor, and that was because he looked like Francis Ford Coppola.
There are absolutely no clichés to be found. They're fighting the Syrians but we never see any, and the enemy is mentioned only once or twice, and then matter-of-factly, not with bitterness or hatred. There is virtually no banter between the men, the kind that we've become so used to. No jokes. No mail call. Just a winter landscape that is foggy, cold, muddy, and altogether inhospitable. Most of us, when we think of Israel, that lonesome Western outlier, think of it as it is during the tourist season, all sunshine and golden grass. But in winter, Mediterranean climates can be as miserable as anywhere else, as any good Californian can tell you.
Speaking of the Mediterranean -- and I'm glad you brought it up -- the film gives us a fairly clear picture of citizens in the Circum-Mediterranean cultural region at war. Here are these Jews running around, shouting and waving their hands and arguing, while the helicopters put-put-put ear-splittingly next to them and the tanks rumble past like diesel trucks. (On the other side, the Syrians are undoubtedly doing the same.) This is 1967 and the men are sloppy and long-haired, and they're good warriors all. What would General Patton with his spit-and-polish have made of this? Most impressive scene. The two men arrive late at a briefing before going to the front. The officer in charge is a bit irritated and asks one of them what he can contribute to the effort now underway. The man gets to his feet, looking a little shy, and says weakly, "Well, we've been trained for this duty. If we have a pilot and another man we will do the job perfectly." Something like that. His demeanor is completely at odds with his confident reply.
It's by no means an uninteresting movie. It's just that the director and the editor overreached themselves and have slowed the tempo down to a funereal pace. There were times when I found myself hoping that the mail call cliché would take place so the men could read letters from their sweethearts back home and joke with one another.
That's about it for the plot.
The film is aesthetically ambitious though. It thrives on its imagery. I haven't seen so many looooong and static shots since Hitchcock's experiments in the late 1940s. Even Ozu would be weirded out by these exhausting scenes during which, for most of the time, nothing much is happening. Men shout over the noise of the battlefield and slog through the mud from one place to another place that's ten feet away. Even after the credits, when we see a man and woman rolling around and having sex on a bed splashed with paints of different colors, the scene goes on and on and on while a saxophone ululates a little mournfully behind them. It's no more erotic than the shifting textures of the loving couple in "Hiroshima, mon Amour." A bit of the background of the two men is sketched in, but not much, so we can't really identify with them. The only other soldier I was able to distinguish was the doctor, and that was because he looked like Francis Ford Coppola.
There are absolutely no clichés to be found. They're fighting the Syrians but we never see any, and the enemy is mentioned only once or twice, and then matter-of-factly, not with bitterness or hatred. There is virtually no banter between the men, the kind that we've become so used to. No jokes. No mail call. Just a winter landscape that is foggy, cold, muddy, and altogether inhospitable. Most of us, when we think of Israel, that lonesome Western outlier, think of it as it is during the tourist season, all sunshine and golden grass. But in winter, Mediterranean climates can be as miserable as anywhere else, as any good Californian can tell you.
Speaking of the Mediterranean -- and I'm glad you brought it up -- the film gives us a fairly clear picture of citizens in the Circum-Mediterranean cultural region at war. Here are these Jews running around, shouting and waving their hands and arguing, while the helicopters put-put-put ear-splittingly next to them and the tanks rumble past like diesel trucks. (On the other side, the Syrians are undoubtedly doing the same.) This is 1967 and the men are sloppy and long-haired, and they're good warriors all. What would General Patton with his spit-and-polish have made of this? Most impressive scene. The two men arrive late at a briefing before going to the front. The officer in charge is a bit irritated and asks one of them what he can contribute to the effort now underway. The man gets to his feet, looking a little shy, and says weakly, "Well, we've been trained for this duty. If we have a pilot and another man we will do the job perfectly." Something like that. His demeanor is completely at odds with his confident reply.
It's by no means an uninteresting movie. It's just that the director and the editor overreached themselves and have slowed the tempo down to a funereal pace. There were times when I found myself hoping that the mail call cliché would take place so the men could read letters from their sweethearts back home and joke with one another.