Foxtrot

It was back to Israel for Foxtrot, but this time for was a Jewish Israeli film, Like Wajib it was a family drama, but unlike Wajib it features Jewish Israelis and we're talking a funeral rather than a wedding.

Foxtrot centres on a middle-aged Israeli (Michael) who lives with his wife  (Dafna) and two young adult children (Jonathon and Alma) in a high-rise apartment in Tel Aviv. Jonathon is currently serving in the IDF and is stationed in the north of Israel. The film opens with a knock on the apartment door and it's two soldiers, announcing that Jonathon has been killed. They're coy about the details, and suggest that viewing the body is unnecessary and undesirable. They act with impressive efficiency - you get a sense of the IDF being an unstoppable well-oiled machine

So we view the family's different reactions to the news, get to meet a few other relatives and get to know people a bit better. Michael's mother is a holocaust survivor who's losing her memory, Michael served in the IDF himself.

Then the first plot twist - the soldiers are back, announcing they got things wrong, and although a Jonathon Feldman has died, it isn't their son. So now there are different kinds of angst to go through. Initially Michael and Alma are fighting, later they find some  mutual consolation in their joint confusion and anger.

Then it's off to the north of Israel and seeing Jonathon's  day-to-day existence. He and three fellow solider live in a container and monitor an isolated checkpoint. There's very little going on but there's some drama when they're inspecting a carful of young Arabs and they mistake a beer can for a grenade and open fire, killing all the occupants. In an almost surreal scene, the ever-efficient IDF sends a massive truck with a bulldozer on the back and the car and everyone in it is buried
 forthwith.And then we have a second plot twist which you can see for yourself if you go to the film.

One of Foxtrot's main messages is that serving in the IDF is bad for you - mentally and physically. You get caught up in. it, and it changes you forever. A sub-message is that surviving the holocaust blights your relationships. And while these are not the cheeriest messages, it was a pretty engrossing watch. Foxtrot was directed by Samuel Moaz who directed Lebanon (set inside an Israeli tank in the 1982 war with Lebanon) which we have also seen,

Anne's rating 3.5/5