Fox­trot

There’s a kind of per­for­ma­tive anx­i­ety that comes when a film direc­tor who is laud­ed by fes­ti­vals and awards bod­ies decides to slink back into the realms of rel­a­tive anonymi­ty rather than crack out a quick­ie fol­low-up to cap­i­talise on any resid­ual suc­cess and brand awareness.

Israeli writer/​director Samuel Maoz won the Gold­en Lion at the Venice Film Fes­ti­val way, way back in 2009 for his debut fea­ture, Lebanon, a film whose neat gim­mick was that it was set entire­ly with­in the bel­ly of a tank. We’ve had an addi­tion­al two year wait for that sec­ond film, as Fox­trot pre­miered in Venice in 2017.

The wait has been worth it, but maybe the occa­sion feels a lit­tle less cel­e­bra­to­ry than it should. Maoz’s new fea­ture is a pristine­ly sculpt­ed tale of famil­ial des­o­la­tion with the fol­ly of mod­ern war­fare lurk­ing in the background.

Ini­tial­ly, it plays like a claus­tro­pho­bic hor­ror film where the por­ten­tous stench of death hangs in the air. From its very first frames, there’s the sense that this is a film that has been laboured over, thought through and refined down to its purest essence. Maoz man­ages to make the drab domes­tic set­ting of a har­ried archi­tect and his wife appear almost as a futur­ist palace. Every cam­era plac­ing is designed to either nudge some sub­tle visu­al sym­bol­ism to the fore, or else house some evoca­tive, painter­ly flourish.

And maybe that’s a prob­lem: this feels like a work where some­one has spent so long think­ing about the details that the big­ger pic­ture has been lost and an irri­tat­ing flaw is the one thing that sticks in the mem­o­ry as the cred­its roll. It is the sto­ry of a cou­ple who are told that their son has been killed in the line of duty – man­ning a check­point on the Israel/​Palestine bor­der. Sud­den­ly his vacant bed­room becomes a shrine for inno­cence lost. The author­i­ties, how­ev­er, are minc­ing their words and fudg­ing their sto­ry – it’s as if they’re invent­ing a cosy nar­ra­tive as a way to dilute the hor­rid facts.

The film’s more enter­tain­ing (but no-less bleak) sec­ond half flash­es back to the son, Jonathan, and his three young, antsy cohorts out in the dessert, sleep­ing in a ship­ping crate that’s sink­ing into a bog and eat­ing lots and lots of ran­cid canned meat. Theirs is a life of bore­dom and servi­tude, made bear­able only because they’re allowed to car­ry guns and are made to think that they’re vital cogs with­in a hulk­ing piece of geopo­lit­i­cal machinery.

Their drudgery and iso­la­tion ends up mak­ing their fear more obvi­ous – when cars trun­dle down this road, their anx­i­ety and lack of world­li­ness leaves them ill-equipped to deal with the most sim­ple process­es, even while pre­sent­ing a veneer of mil­i­taris­tic authority.

It’s a strange film, impres­sive as a piece of fine­ly-wrought craft which brims with caus­tic emo­tion. It even works as an enraged screed about polit­i­cal cor­rup­tion at the core of a dirty war in which human life has less than no val­ue. Every­thing is so minute­ly cal­i­brat­ed that, when we arrive at the film’s glib punch­line (and it’s a punch­line rather than a con­clu­sion), you feel that Maoz has under­sold his aims in search of iron­ic bathos rather than some­thing more mean­ing­ful and impactful.

It’s a bit of a wash out, and undoes lots of the good work that pre­cedes it. Even so, Maoz def­i­nite­ly knows how to knock a film togeth­er, so fin­gers crossed that the win­dow between this and his next one is a lot more narrow.