In Saving Private Ryan director Steven Spielberg recreates the D-Day invasion of Normandy with half an hour of unmatched technical brilliance. He then surrounds the scene with ordinary Hollywood drivel and saccharine sentimentality, diluting its power and obliterating the possibility of more than comic book insight into war. More recently, director Michael Bay, in another war blockbuster, Pearl Harbor, buries the half hour ofsurprise attack footage in a cornball romance aimed at the broadest possible commercial market.
In war, humankind raises its most destructive, least civilized powers into massive outbursts of irrational inhumanity. Movies like Ryan and Pearl Harbor do a real disservice, glamorizing and romanticizing war. Might that result, in part, from the fact that neither Spielberg nor Bay has ever actually been under fire?
Amos Gitai has been there and back. Kippur, the Israeli filmmaker’s thirty-ninth film, is based on his own experiences as a member of a medical evacuation team in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when, on the holiest day of the Jewish year, the Syrians launched a surprise attack on Israel at the Golan Heights. Kippur captures the ugliness, the aimless destructiveness, and the pain of war as seen through the observant eyes of Weinraub (Liron Levo)–thoughtful, introspective, an intellectual who cites Marcuse. When the sirens interrupt his idyllic afternoon lovemaking (he and his woman awash in marbleized colors of paint), he picks up his fellow reservist, Ruso (Tomer Ruso), an officer. Ruso is enthusiastic, energized, impatient, anticipating the fray. As they drive to war, he gives the impression he’s on his way to an amusement park.
Failing to find their own unit in the confusion, they hook up with a dedicated doctor, Klauzner (Uri Ran Klauzner) and become part of a team flying in by helicopter to evacuate the wounded from the front. The film follows them through repeated trips; the doctor is forced to make difficult decisions of triage–who will live? who is beyond hope?–as they encounter the gruesome burns, amputations, and disfigurements of victims of rockets and mortar fire.
Gitai builds a long, slow, and subtle crescendo of horror as the medics become numb with exhaustion, as the tanks circle in their bizarre dance of death and destruction, leaving the landscape scarred with deep, muddy ruts. The constant noises of ‘copter blades, guns, and tanks assault the ear and the pervasive dust and smoke of the battlefield cumulatively intensify the hellish atmosphere."Every minute of silence is a great treasure to me," one says. A scene of ultimate frustration shows the team as they try to carry a wounded solider out; they are so bogged down in thick, gluey mud that they repeatedly lose control and drop the litter.
While the scenes at the front dominate, Gitai provides careful detail to flesh out the three central characterizations. Weinraub, Ruso, and Klauzner all become believable, three-dimensional characters–real people desperately trying to save lives even as the guns continue to blow lives away. Ruso’s initial enthusiasm for this adventure turns into decisive leadership in the field, shifting perception of the character. The doctor is haunted by his own history of being separated as a boy from his mother during World War II. They read in a newspaper about the trivial adjustments to civilian routines, while life and death have become the currency of their own day-to-day experience. Weinraub peers from the helicopter, the light catching his strong features as he watches the scene unfolding below, observant and contemplative, a melancholy saxophone capturing his mood.
Kippuris an uncompromising look at war, not expressed through grand spectacle, but through the unglamorous, unromanticized, gritty and intimate experience of people caught up in hellish circumstances not of their making. No one wins.
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