| Day One |
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Thursday September 7th, 2000
Opening night of the film festival, and there is very few films to choose from tonight. Our first choice Urbania was sold out so we opted for an Israeli movie called Kippur instead.
Title: Kippur Kippur is a semi-autobiographical account of the director's experiences during the 1973 War of Yom Kippur. The movie focuses on the story of two young army reservists Weinraub and Ruso who are unable to join their unit when the war breaks out suddenly. Intent on not missing out on their opportunity for "glory" the two join up with a helicopter rescue unit responsible for evacuating wounded soldiers and pilots who have been shot down. Kippur is short on narrative and plot, choosing instead to focus on the chaotic nature of war. Battles are largely fought off screen and we are only privy to the aftermath of war. What fighting does occur on screen consists of an unseen enemy shelling troops and tanks. At the outset of the movie, I had assumed one of the challenges of the picture was going to be how to create the illusion of a war on film, with out showing a lot of battles, explosions etc. I had mistakenly presumed that the director was working with a limited budget and was more interested in telling the soldier's story than creating a "war movie". I couldn't have been farther from the truth. The military hardware in this picture includes of a number of helicopters and several tanks. The special effects, explosions, sounds etc. were spectacular and went a long way to creating a sense of chaos in the movie. One scene in particular that the director mentioned afterwards was a group of tanks maneuvering across the scarred ruins of some small village or farm. The director had purposely wanted to avoid the classic war picture scene of tanks driving in neat columns off to battle. His experience was much more chaotic than that and he wanted to emphasis it in his movie. Although he noted that trying to orchestrate and direct such "chaotic" scenes were a challenge. Unfortunately, I found the lack of narrative in this movie and the abundance of white noise from such things as the helicopter wash made it extremely difficult for me to maintain my focus at times and occasionally nodded off. Not a particular good choice of movie to see after a long day at the office. My apologies to the director. My one other criticism of the movie was the framing sequences the director chose to begin and end the film. Weinraub and his girlfriend are shown naked rolling around in a chaotic mix of paints that they have smeared on the bed and then on themselves. This scene is over laid with a very overbearing saxophone track that does nothing for the film. The director explained his choice of the framing sequences as a demonstration of how the chaos of war interrupts daily life. A little two artsy for my tastes. Some audience members went a step further, taking the director to task for the lack of reference to religion in the movie. I could see their point considering the war breaks out on Yom Kippur and besides the streets of the town being deserted for the religious holiday there is no other mention of religion. In rating my movies from the festival, I am trying to come up with an easy way to rank the pictures. A pass / fail system seems a little harsh, since there tends to be more of a range of the type of movies at the festival. I think I will rank the movies as either
Just Plain Awful -- What was I thinking choosing this crap! This system may change as the festival progresses and I find films that don't fit this structure. For the time being I think I can rank Kippur as Enjoyable but disappointing. Until Later.... |