A Brief Comment on "Foxtrot"

Gardner 2022-10-23 09:02:28

There is such a dance, no matter where it starts, it always returns to the same starting point.

Act 1

In Israel, a peaceful middle-class family welcomed a visit from several soldiers. The mother was the first to notice the strangeness and fainted. The father watched as they swiftly took out the syringe and gave the wife a sedative. Then they announced the news: the eldest son serving abroad died.

The father endured his grief and accepted the military's professional "condolences", and told his mother in the mental hospital that when discussing about his son's funeral, he learned that his son was not dead, but the person with the same name as his son. At this time, the father panicked and did not hesitate to use a special relationship to ask his son to go home.

Act II

At the border, a son under 20 years old was stationed in a humble house with three other comrades. They were bored, listening to the radio, dancing with M4 rifles, letting roaming camels pass, and using the speed of the cans to prove that the house was constantly tilt. The son adapted his father's bedside stories into comics and drew them in a notebook.

One night, a comrade-in-arms mistook a beer can dropped from a passing vehicle for a grenade, and his nervous son took a machine gun and killed four Palestinian youths in the car.

The next day, a bulldozer buried the scrapped car, and the officer who handled the matter said to his son: You can go home.

Midfield: The Last Bedside Story

As a child, his father traded an heirloom Hebrew Bible for pornographic magazines, and his mother suffered a nervous breakdown. Later, his father joined the army, retired after the expiration of the term, graduated from university with honors, married a wife and had children, and finally became an excellent architect. Behind all the glory, tears will be wiped away only on the night when no one is there.

Act Three

In a blink of an eye, it was his son's twentieth birthday, but only the couple drank alone in front of the candlelight.

Unexpectedly, what the father tried so hard to avoid ended up being the reason for his son's demise. After the mother accused the father, he smoked marijuana and made fun of his son's funeral in front of a smoky candle.

In the afterglow, the couple danced the foxtrot.

end

On the military vehicle, my son finished the last painting, which was a bulldozer with a sedan aloft. At this time, the leisurely camel appeared on the road. The driver couldn't dodge in time, and the vehicle fell into the cliff.

This is a war movie. What's interesting is that the film is surprisingly restrained, and unlike the general impression of the inherent image of war movies, there is no strong expression of war or over-exaggeration of heroes in the film.

The four young soldiers stationed on the frontier are tasked with screening all vehicles passing by and spending their daily time. The blue sky sets off the boundless wasteland, and the colorful graffiti embellishes the lonely heart of the solo soldier, without the slightest trace of war.

It wasn't until the first shot that the audience's mind was pulled back to reality. It is better to kill a thousand by mistake than to let one go. Even if the other party is a young girl who has a good impression of each other, the soldier will drop the paintbrush and take up the machine gun to slaughter everything in front of him.

There is another detail in the film that depicts the war, and its "professionalism" is chilling when the military condolences to the family. The pain of losing a child in front of the righteousness of the family seems to be insignificant, and the grief is not surprising.

There are three foxtrot dances in the film, which are the old man in the nursing home in the first act; the young soldier in the second act; and the dancing couple in the third act, which correspond to their own loneliness and fate.

The protagonist of the film is the father. But there is not much depiction of the father's past, which also provides room for the audience's interpretation. Father is like an egoist who rejects the world and will do whatever is good for him. When my father was a young man, he was also a man on campus, and it seemed that this kind of vanity would lead him to buy heirlooms in exchange for pornographic magazines. On the way back from the victory of the battle, he will let his comrades lead the way.

The bright and beautiful appearance is to hide the secret of their own vulnerability.

Family members are well aware of their vulnerability, and they live with their wounds to make themselves strong. Family is his last line of defense. This is why he chooses to notify his mother the first time he learns that his son "passes away", and why he chooses to let his son come back to him as soon as he learns that his son is alive, and this kind of protection for his son is precisely the The reason for his death.

At the end of the film, the wife stared at the last painting of her son and said: You are the bulldozer, I am the car.

Perhaps, like this father, the secret he tried so hard to bury would eventually be the result of punishing him.

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