When you dance the foxtrot, you always end up in the same place you started. It's a dance of repeated cycles, and the Israeli film Foxtrot asks us to apply those cycles to war and grief, two subjects never far from the reality of Israel or the world itself.
The results are stunning. Foxtrot takes us from unfathomable mourning to soul-numbing tedium and back again. The action takes place at a remote military roadblock and in a coldly upscale Tel Aviv apartment, but its roots stretch back to the Holocaust and through generations of guilt and tamped-down rage. Rather than drop these matters on the audience like a ton of bricks, writer-director Samuel Maoz approaches them with a hint of the human condition's absurdity. Foxtrot is by turns shattering and droll, lyrical and cathartic.
A bearded architect (Lior Ashkenazi) and his younger wife (Sarah Adler) have their lives torn apart by a visit from army bureaucrats. Michael and Daphna know immediately why the visitors are at their door: Their son, Daniel, has been killed in action. Daphna is summarily sedated, leaving Michael to command the screen for the film's first act. This is where Ashkenazi makes Foxtrot his own and starts building one of the great performances of recent cinema.
Numbed by the news, Michael is equally angered by the officious manner in which the news is delivered. He simmers as he's instructed to set his alarm to go off every hour, reminding him to drink a glass of water. He fumes when he suspects the army doesn't have his son's body. All the while he's burying some trauma deep within, though we don't yet know what it is. Ashkenazi allows all of this to penetrate through a sort of glassy-eyed numbness. Michael is entirely there, and yet he's not there at all.
From here the action shifts to a desolate military post, where four young men fight a surreal brand of boredom. The checkpoint they oversee gets as much action from passing camels as from potential threats. They pass the time by rolling cans of potted meat across the floor of their residential container and timing their passage to see whether the container is sinking into the muck. The gray skies, muddy ground and rusted-out equipment provides a stark contrast to the modern amenities and design back home in Tel Aviv. Maoz carefully nurtures the tension that comes from waiting for something to happen. Then, it happens. And the film takes another shift, rearranging our experience and expectations.
Maoz remains in complete control throughout; as often as the ground beneath the story tilts, the film maintains a sharp assurance in what it's doing and why. As we find out more about Michael, a temperamental shell of a man who takes out his powerlessness by kicking the family dog, the film suggests that a "forever war" doesn't mean months, or even years. Decades of regret have lodged underneath his skin.
Maoz employs a jaunty rifle dance and a haunting animated sequence, both perfectly timed and sharply attuned to the story's sorrows. Yet Foxtrot is far from a death march. It's alive to the range of human emotion and the uncomfortable humor of extreme circumstance. Its detonations ripple far and wide.
