If youâre looking for easy metaphors, Foxtrot helpfully explains the one in its title during a scene between a pair of grieving parents. Michael (Lior Ashkenazi) demonstrates to his younger wife Dafna (Sarah Adler) the danceâs simple, repetitive steps, first separating and then bringing his feet back together. âNo matter where you go,â he says, âyou always end up at the same starting point.â
The film, too, has a circular nature: The first and third sections in its three-act format echo each other in their near-claustrophobic focus on Michael and Dafna as they process the news that their soldier son, Jonathan (Yonatan Shiray), has been killed in action. Forget the blatant box-step metaphor, though: Israeli writer/director Samuel Maoz does not bring us back to our starting point. Foxtrot is an extraordinary experience, full of sadness, humor, banality, and beauty, and you will likely come out of it changed, or at least moved.
Michael dominates the first chunk of Maozâs triptych, and we watch him suffocated by disbelieving grief while Dafna sleeps under sedation in their Tel Aviv apartment. The rawness of Michaelâs agony collides with the implacable bureaucratic calm of the Israel Defense Forces officers who have brought the family the bad news and attempt to make funeral arrangements.
One helpful soldier instructs Michael to drink a glass of water every hour, even setting an alarm on his phone to remind him, but when Michaelâs not sitting in silence or attempting to choke down swallows of water, he lashes out destructively, kicking Jonathanâs poor dog and putting his hand under hot water until it burns the skin. An early twist reframes everything, but I think itâs best left unrevealed, though there are subsequent, crueler twists in Michael and Dafnaâs future.
Then Foxtrotâs poetic central section unfolds, and itâs a remarkable mini-film of its own, depicting Jonathan at his post at a desolate border checkpoint. Surrounded by vast stretches of flat, muddy desert and only occasionally disrupted by a lone vehicle, Jonathan and his fellow soldiers are isolated in a limbo of repetition. The filmâs tone turns comically bizarre, using surreal flourishes to depict the dehumanizing day-to-day boredom of the young menâs assignment even as it reveals the undeniable tug of hope.
Gone is the deliberately cramped perspective of Maozâs last film, 2009âs excellent, autobiographical Lebanon, which took place entirely inside an Israeli tank during the 1982 Lebanon War. In its place are a series of fantastic, indelible visuals: a riderless camel, a shipping container slowly sinking into the earth, a young Arab woman caught in the checkpointâs searchlight.
Thereâs a sense that maybe weâve left the real world during this bravura middle sequence: Are we inside Michaelâs head, imagining what the final days of his sonâan aspiring artistâmust have been like? But there are details too small and banal to be wholly imagined, and the quiet squalor of the soldiersâ lives is interrupted by brief spasms of casual cruelty, ecstatic release, and, of course, violence. Soon weâre inside Jonathanâs head, too, and his drawings come to life in an animated sequence that may not necessarily tell the truth of Michaelâs biography, but certainly illustrates how Jonathan sees his father.
Despite the Israel-Palestine conflict that colors Foxtrotâand the condemnation the movie received from the Israeli government for one controversial sequenceâIâd guess that explicit political commentary is the furthest thing from Maozâs mind. Instead, heâs interested in a much more personal type of storytelling, one where hilarity and pain exist on equal footing, like perfectly matched dance partners. Maybe thereâs something to that foxtrot metaphor after all.