KIPPUR (2000) / ** 1/2 [Hebrew; English subtitles]
Directed by Amos Gitai. Screenplay by Gitai and Marie-Jose Sanselme. Starring Liron Levo, Tomer Russo, Uri Ran-Klausner. Running time: 124 minutes. This film is not yet rated by the MFCB. Reviewed on September 30th, 2001.
By SHANNON PATRICK SULLIVAN
Synopsis: On the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur in 1973, Egyptian and Syrian armies attacked Israel. "Kippur" follows two Israeli soldiers, Weinraub (Levo) and Ruso (Russo), who become separated from their unit in the confusion following the incursion. Rescuing a military doctor (Ran-Klausner) whose car has broken down, Weinraub and Ruso join his rescue-and-retrieval operation, trying to ferry out the wounded while death rains down all around them.
Review: "Kippur" is less a drama about war than a meditation on its effects. There are no great clashes between opposing armies, no scenes of individual heroism (at least, not of the conventional sort). Indeed, the Egyptian and Syrian armies are never glimpsed, and the front-line Israeli troops who appear are, for the most part, either dead, wounded or in flight. Instead, Gitai paints "Kippur" with devastating images of what the war did to his country and his countrymen. We see great plains turned into seas of mud by the grinding tire tracks of the tanks. Officers are reduced to confused wretches, unable to differentiate the dead from the survivors. And Gitai impresses upon us the sheer monotony of war: long stretches of "Kippur" are spent watching the characters sit waiting in silence, or haplessly trying to rescue a casualty from a sodden battlefield. "Kippur" is a movie of impressions, not plot. With a running time of more than two hours, this does lend the movie an agonisingly repetitive feel, and it is unfortunate that Gitai does not develop better characters on which to hang the viewer's interest. But though the middle part of "Kippur" is a chore to get through, the final act exhibits some fine filmmaking, as Gitai effectively shocks us out of our complacency. And war, after all, is one thing about which we should never be complacent.
Copyright © 2001 Shannon Patrick Sullivan. Archived at The Popcorn Gallery, http://www.physics.mun.ca/~sps/movies.html
| Shannon Patrick Sullivan | shannon@mun.ca | +---------------------------------+---------------------------------+ / Doctor Who: A Brief History of Time (Travel) go.to/drwho-history \ \__ We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars __/
========== X-RAMR-ID: 29642 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 252375 X-RT-TitleID: 1103269 X-RT-SourceID: 886 X-RT-AuthorID: 1699 X-RT-RatingText: 2.5/4
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews