Sunday, October 21, 2007

"Beaufort"

The Israeli movie "Beaufort" (pronounced Beaufor in French and Hebrew) has been selected as the Israeli entry in the foreign movie category at the Oscars. The first choice was "The Band" about an Egyptian band that gets stranded over the weekend in a poor Israeli desert town, but greater than 50% of the dialog is in English, so the film was disqualified.
"Beaufort" is an intensely Israeli movie about war and indirectly about the politics of military action in Israel. Although it is a well directed move (director Joseph Cedar) based on the book by Ron Leshen, and has authenticity, it lacks the kind of action and pace that American audiences are used to. As a war movie it would be considered a flop in the US, since much of it is slow and predictable. As soon as the bomb disposal expert appears you know he is going to get killed, and then he is quickly and unceremoniously dispatched. One never has enough connection with the victims and the survivors to really build up any personal sympathy for them.
The main theme of this "leftist" oriented anti-war film is that the higher ups don't care if they sacrifice ordinary soldiers for unecessary actions. It raises the question why was it necessary for the IDF to capture the Crusader fortress of Beaufort on a mountain inside Lebanon in 1982 and then hold it, when the political echelons knew that it would eventually be relinquished. But, this is too self-serving, since in war one never knows for sure the outcome and taking and holding strategic heights is a constant in warfare, even if they have to be given up. But Beaufort was held for the whole 17 years (!) that IDF forces were in south Lebanon, and holding it was clearly a strategic military necessity. So the morose complaints of the soldiers at the end of the IDF presence in Lebanon (before the next war in 2005) were understandable, but hardly persuasive.
When another IDF soldier on Beaufort was killed by Hizbollah using a new missile and the Four Mother's campaign reached its climax in Israel in 2000, PM Barak ordered a peremptory withdrawal of the IDF from Lebanon in one day. This "retreat" by the IDF was declared a victory by Hizbollah and no doubt lead to the next round of fighting and subsequent casualties. If Nasrallah sees this movie he might well be convinced that most IDF soldiers are a sorry lot of defeatists.
The audience shares the relief of the IDF protagonists that they are able to return home to Israel. But the intense focus on the small unit in Beaufort, separate from all other considerations, apart from the usual soldier's hope that it will all be over soon, that he will survive and go home to his mother and girlfriend, is suffocating. Not exactly original material. Still, this type of movie, although politically motivated and determinedly anti-war, nevertheless represents an improvement on the past Israel cinema of superficial trivia.

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