...Beaufort--nominated this year for an Academy Award as Best Foreign Language Film--he has taken an artistic leap forward and begun to fully realize his potential as a filmmaker--making a much more ambitious, penetrating film than his earlier, more conventional works.

Beaufort depicts the last days in 2000 of a small, isolated group of Israeli soldiers, who are stationed in a concrete and steel dugout maze in the backyard of Lebanon's Beaufort Castle (built by the Crusaders in the twelfth century, it has over the years changed hands many times, including being held by the PLO during the Lebanese Civil War in the Seventies). The soldiers are part of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF), who are withdrawing from southern Lebanon, where they have been posted since the First War in Lebanon in 1982.

The enemy, Hezbollah, remains unseen except for the constant incoming missile and rocket explosions that are laconically announced over a loudspeaker. Working with a comparatively low budget, at least by the standards of an American war film, Cedar (himself an IDF veteran) creates remarkable tension out of the soldiers' anxiety and claustrophobic confinement, punctuated by numerous cacophonous scenes where blinding smoke and flames suddenly overwhelm their stifling and, for the viewer, disorienting fortification. The oppressiveness and boredom of the long battle is reinforced by a limited palette of color dominated by green and grayish-brown tones, almost exclusively shot within the dark labyrinth of the underground tunnels that have been built to provide refuge for the soldiers from the bombing. The world outside is barely seen, except for a few shots of the bleakly striking landscape, but that's also where death emanates from--so it's no refuge.

The film 's central figure is Beaufort's brooding, melancholy twenty-two-year-old commander, Lt. Liraz (Oshri Cohen). He's a professional soldier whose whole identity is so obsessively wrapped up in serving the army that hesitated making him an officer. But in blindly adhering to orders he sacrifices the lives of men like Ziv (Ohad Knoller)--a demolition expert ordered unnecessarily to remove an explosive device from a road the IDF were anyhow planning to give up to Hezbollah.

The other soldiers are less defined--most are very young men with ordinary dreams of becoming musicians or visiting a girlfriend in New Jersey after the war. All of them are weary of the war, and most see Liraz as an "asshole." Although usually shot in tight close-up, the soldiers tend to blur together in their green camouflage uniforms and heavy gear, so we don't have an easy time distinguishing one character from another. The most distinctive is the tough, conscience-stricken, compassionate medic, Koris (Itay Titan), who is repelled by the pointless deaths that holding the fort involves, and is enraged with Liraz's inability to break with the orders he has received.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

After Liraz, frozen with fear, fails to go to the aid of his wounded friend Oshri (Eli Etonyo), he angrily begins to question his role at Beaufort. He confronts the army staff about their lack of concern about his troops, who remain sitting ducks at an outpost that is due to be surrendered. Ultimately, he acquiesces to his superiors' orders. Liraz, finally, is too invested in his military commitment to break the rules. But he begins to soften towards the men under his command--demonstrating an empathy and concern that he never expressed previously. He too just wants to go home.

None of the soldiers in Cedar's film embrace the war, or indulge in vainglorious heroics. They just hope to survive a battle that they know is futile. But they also don't engage in explicit political critiques of the government. Cedar makes it clear that their officers have callously abandoned them, but he stays with the consciousness of the soldiers, rather than grafting on to the film a larger, critical view of the Israeli-Arab conflict or Israeli military policy. It makes for a very grounded, concrete film that emphasizes emotional immediacy over intellectual and political debate. It's sympathetic to the Israeli soldiers, but not to the army hierarchy that has sent them there.

Cedar has made a quietly powerful, antiwar film that implicitly suggests, without much elaboration or exposition, that there is something terribly wrong with Israeli policies. It's a point of view echoed, in very different ways,...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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