Kippur (No Rating)
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Based on the war-time experiences of Israeli director Amos Gitaï, whose previous film Kadosh fearlessly critiqued the tenets of ultra-Orthodox Jewish life in Jerusalem, this vivid and intense combat film portrays the Yom Kippur War of 1973 as a surreal nightmare rather than a political conflict--which is to say that, in its way, it's political. After an incredibly beautiful scene of a young Tel Aviv couple making love while covering each other with multicolored finger paint (the calm before the storm, it appears), the movie follows Gitaï's 23-year-old alter ego (Liron Levo) through his horrifying stint with a team of helicopter medics cleaning up carnage on the Golan Heights battleground, building to an excruciating scene in which members of the unit struggle endlessly to pull an amputee--who may, in fact, already be dead--out of a muddy hole. Grounded in messy details rather than ideals, Kippur is an antiwar film in ideology, certainly, and that includes Gitaï's narrative style, which thoroughly eschews heroism in favor of chaos, trauma, pain, exhaustion, even boredom. It makes a movie like Saving Private Ryan, for all its vaunted "realism," look flashy and pernicious. (Rob Nelson)
Review by Rob Nelson
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