Seeing 'Beaufort' during this pre-Oscar period makes me wonder how it is being perceived by the non-Israeli viewer. The reason is that this is one of these movies with a strong political message, full of nuances and conflicts that I am afraid will be lost to the foreign viewer. And yet, it is a better international film that Israeli film. I will try to explain.
There is a lot of cinema aesthetics to be enjoyed in 'Beaufort'. The setting is a direct quote from Kubrick's Space Odyssey, the fortified bunker in the Lebanon of the year 2000 seems to be a spaceship in an hostile and incomprehensible universe, while the Israeli soldiers spending their last weeks before Israel's retreat dressed in the heavy and techno-sophisticated equipment with their weapons upon them all the time seem to be astronauts fighting some invisible monsters who hit when you expect less. The abstractionism of the conflict, the faceless enemy, the waiting, fear, survival instinct are all human themes that find the path to the hearts of any viewer beyond politics.
It's a very different movie for an Israeli viewer and especially for somebody who went through the experience of the army, who understands the language and the tension. The characters on screen look familiar to the Israeli viewers, they may be themselves or their children, or their neighbors. The film does not make any clear political statement, and this is a statement by itself.
Director Joseph Cedar succeeds to control at the level of detail the image and the sound. Sound work is especially amazing, after a few minutes the viewer will learn as the soldiers on mount Beaufort to discriminate between 'outputs' (friendly artillery fire) and 'falls' (hostile fire).
And yet, it is from the Israeli perspective that I found more flaws. It is not the lack of political message that disturbed me, actually I found better as in real life that the director avoided to drive to conclusions and let everybody seeing the film to draw its own. There are too many characters in this film who are part of a schema, and not even commander Liraz well acted by Oshri Cohen reaches the psychological deepness of the characters of other lesser known and perhaps not so good Israeli war films. When one of the characters starts to open himself to his comrades and the viewer his end is coming soon, and this looks painfully simplistic. The overall balance is also broken by the final scenes when the soldiers are back home after a war in which victory means just personal survival - these may be emotional for the Israeli audiences but they are artistically unfinished.
I would have loved the film to have a different ending, in the frame where the metal plaque with the names of the soldiers fallen in the fights at the conquest of the mountain at the beginning of the war melts in the fire. One of the characters comments that the plaque could not be taken out in the turmoil of the retreat, like the fallen heroes wanted to stay where they died. Those were the first soldiers fallen in the war in 1982 in a fight famous in the military Israeli mythology. Now their names melted down in the last flames of the same war, heroes and victims at the same time of a war as absurd as any other war.
There is a lot of cinema aesthetics to be enjoyed in 'Beaufort'. The setting is a direct quote from Kubrick's Space Odyssey, the fortified bunker in the Lebanon of the year 2000 seems to be a spaceship in an hostile and incomprehensible universe, while the Israeli soldiers spending their last weeks before Israel's retreat dressed in the heavy and techno-sophisticated equipment with their weapons upon them all the time seem to be astronauts fighting some invisible monsters who hit when you expect less. The abstractionism of the conflict, the faceless enemy, the waiting, fear, survival instinct are all human themes that find the path to the hearts of any viewer beyond politics.
It's a very different movie for an Israeli viewer and especially for somebody who went through the experience of the army, who understands the language and the tension. The characters on screen look familiar to the Israeli viewers, they may be themselves or their children, or their neighbors. The film does not make any clear political statement, and this is a statement by itself.
Director Joseph Cedar succeeds to control at the level of detail the image and the sound. Sound work is especially amazing, after a few minutes the viewer will learn as the soldiers on mount Beaufort to discriminate between 'outputs' (friendly artillery fire) and 'falls' (hostile fire).
And yet, it is from the Israeli perspective that I found more flaws. It is not the lack of political message that disturbed me, actually I found better as in real life that the director avoided to drive to conclusions and let everybody seeing the film to draw its own. There are too many characters in this film who are part of a schema, and not even commander Liraz well acted by Oshri Cohen reaches the psychological deepness of the characters of other lesser known and perhaps not so good Israeli war films. When one of the characters starts to open himself to his comrades and the viewer his end is coming soon, and this looks painfully simplistic. The overall balance is also broken by the final scenes when the soldiers are back home after a war in which victory means just personal survival - these may be emotional for the Israeli audiences but they are artistically unfinished.
I would have loved the film to have a different ending, in the frame where the metal plaque with the names of the soldiers fallen in the fights at the conquest of the mountain at the beginning of the war melts in the fire. One of the characters comments that the plaque could not be taken out in the turmoil of the retreat, like the fallen heroes wanted to stay where they died. Those were the first soldiers fallen in the war in 1982 in a fight famous in the military Israeli mythology. Now their names melted down in the last flames of the same war, heroes and victims at the same time of a war as absurd as any other war.