Review: Foxtrot (2017)
Directed by Samuel Maoz; screenplay by Samuel Maoz; starring Lior Ashkenazi, Sarah Adler and Yonathan Shiray.
4.5/5
Foxtrot, an Israeli-German-French-Swiss production directed by Samuel Maoz as it proudly announces itself, is a film that deserves so many more words than the few I can lend it here. Probably words of a higher quality than mine too. What I can relate to you is my reaction to this incredibly powerful film, the difficulties I had with it, but more conclusively the power its final image had to help everything slot into place and solidify it as essential viewing.
The whole thing is rather theatrical in form. It’s split into three neat acts, falling just short of labelling them as such, with a short prologue and epilogue tying everything together. The first and last acts are a pair of Haneke-esque domestic melodramas, concerned with two parents, Michael (Lior Ashkenazi) and Dafna (Sarah Adler) Feldman, coming to terms with the mortality of their son, Jonathan (Yonathan Shiray), an IDF soldier with a penchant for illustration whose sudden death rocks the foundations of their relationship. Wedged between, in the second act, we watch as said son attempts to survive his seemingly purgatorial assignment to man a checkpoint located somewhere unspecified along the border (a “Seam Zone”, as one unhelpful officer describes it to his parents.) On the one hand, Michael and Dafna’s civilian world is fraught with melodrama and seething rage, but nothing is quite expressed in explicit terms until the very last moments. Jonathan’s, on the other, is rather the opposite. He and his squad seem relatively at ease with the world; if anything’s going to kill them, it’s the boredom – that or the sinking barracks they’ve been given.
As the film starts and Michael and Dafna are handed the crushing news regarding Jonathan, it takes Michael – left alone to deal with things when his wife is sedated after having a seizure – a whole ten minutes of screen-time before uttering a single word. This restraint, this shellshocked muteness, is illustrative of what I truly adore about Foxtrot. At its best, it refuses to give easy answers and forces you to hang on to every syllable in the hopes that some kind of answer might be squeezed from some out-of-place inflection. A particularly lovely little exchange demonstrates this. Michael, having just rolled a joint for the first time in years, remarks to Dafna that “some things you never forget,” and when he goes further and adds “like the sea scent of the rooftop flat,” it’s clear that he’s just extended all he has left to give over to his wife. But Michael’s affection is the furthest thing Dafna’s mind right now and she brushes it aside quietly and but quite pointedly: “like the birthday of my child.” The muted dismissal is utterly devastating to watch and really just a masterwork of subtext.
What will be perhaps the trickiest part of the film for most viewers, and indeed myself at times, was the tendency it had to drag things out to bitter lengths. It isn’t all done for no real reason, but Maoz seems far more comfortable depicting the reactions each character is having to their situation rather than depicting the situation itself and I can see that potentially leading some to cry pretension here. Personally, I think what we learn along the way rather conclusively justifies the uncomfortably drawn-out scenarios prior, but that does not mean this aspect won’t be a stumbling block for many.
Moreover, the sheer unlikeability of the parental figures, especially the father, might also be a real catching point. Again, while I think the fact the film still manages to make these figures tragic rather than purely contemptuous is a marvel to behold, the immediate guttural reaction some might feel to some early scenes such as one featuring the grieving Michael kicking what might be one of the cutest on-screen dogs I’ve seen in a little while might be enough to make the whole thing appear as a bit of a nasty piece of work.
Nonetheless, I still urge you to give it a go. It’s about family rituals and the generational harm individuals can come to sow with their own petty flaws. Beneath its veneer of cringe-inducing realism, Foxtrot is a supremely constructed morality play with the sole intention of teaching us something visceral. The foxtrot is a timeless dance with four simple steps that lead you round and round in circles, over and over and, at its core, Maoz’ Foxtrot is a film about the impact sins of the parents on the younger generation.
Watched on 6th May 2021