Foxtrot (2017, Samuel Maoz) (Patreon)

35/100

Put this off for three years because the people who love it had likewise raved about Lebanon, which impressed me not much at all. (Also because it didn't play anywhere near me prior to year-end voting, and any sense of urgency pretty much disappears thereafter.) Sure enough, I still feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Maoz's apparently signature phoniness takes hold almost instantly, with both of Jonathan's parents registering shock in exaggerated fashion: She faints dead away upon seeing soldiers at the front door, he goes almost catatonically mute. Later, in a typically overdetermined touch, Dad will deliberately scald his hand to numb the pain, while Mom (at a separate time, but with the same intention) scrubs her knuckles until they bleed; we then get a shot of the now-separated couple holding their injured hands, reunited in their grief. Hard for me to comprehend how others aren't rolling their eyes at stuff like this—let's not even get into the film's title and its variant symbolic "appearances"—but that does appear to be the case, somehow. Each of the film's three discrete sections struck me as individually bad (though I was most irritated by the middle part, with its manufactured whimsy and utterly non-credible "accidental atrocity"/cover-up), but they're also collectively incoherent; there's no real exploration of the particular mindfuck involved in having a loved one taken from you, miraculously restored, and then immediately taken again, which makes the entire first "movement" retroactively irrelevant. No doubt Maoz would argue that this reflects his country's cruel, futile state of perpetual quasi-warfare, but he either can't or won't commit to a unified approach, instead vacillating clumsily between naturalism and absurdism. (The latter includes perhaps the single dumbest ending since Gallo's original cut of The Brown Bunny.) I'll concede that the guy is not devoid of talent: Some images, like the bulldozer track gradually obscured by rainfall, do have a poetic frisson to them, and I was genuinely moved by the sequence in which a Palestinian couple, dressed to the nines, silently maintain their dignity as their night on the town gets ruined by checkpoint bullshit. If you'd prefer 90 such compelling minutes to a mere handful, however, seek out the 2016 Un Certain Regard selection Personal Affairs, directed by an Elia Suleiman protégée who actually understands tonal modulation. (DEMORALIZING DISCLAIMER: That film is currently all but impossible to find. But file the title away.)

[Note to self: Add something about Arvo Pärt when you move this to the 'boxd.]