Kippur
By Fred Camper
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Perhaps the director’s experience accounts for the film’s deeply felt sense of chaos. Soon the two young men have to maneuver around a truck and other vehicles to pass along the road. This long take recalls the famous traffic-jam long take in Jean-Luc Godard’s Weekend (1967). But the Godard shot is a panoramic tableau, a distanced and ironized view of a civilization choking on automobiles. In Kippur Gitai’s camera, plunged into the action, is forced to twist and turn with its characters in an unpredictable environment. Soon after this long take we get another, this time from the rear of the car looking through the windshield as the men are forced to turn back: the Syrians have broken through into the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and are still advancing. The camera follows our two travelers as they make a U-turn in the car, the landscape swiveling around them.
Eventually they discover that their unit has already departed and meet a Dr. Klauzner (Uri Ran Klauzner), whose car has broken down; they take him back to his base, and all three join a helicopter unit rescuing wounded soldiers and shot-down pilots. On their first mission, we see them land in a relatively “objective” long shot, then the camera pans with them as they leave the helicopter, following them through a twisting trench as they discover that everyone is dead. In this stark labyrinth an argument erupts: some soldiers want to retrieve the dead, which is against the rules.
A subsequent scene in the hospital is filmed in a single, relatively undramatic seven-minute take. Here the long take links the men’s fates even though they’re shown to be divergent–some are critically injured while one isn’t hurt at all. But all are physically and psychologically exhausted. Klauzner gives a lucid account of their injuries but brushes aside a question about himself by saying he wants to be with his mother, who died many years earlier of a “broken heart” when she returned to retrieve him from a family she’d left him with during the Holocaust and he failed to recognize her. (The doctor in Gitai’s unit, one of the injured, lapsed into a coma from which he never recovered.)
The film’s opening and closing scenes, which show Weinraub and his girlfriend making love, have been a source of controversy, criticized even by some of the film’s admirers. Richard Peña, director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center, calls them “the film’s only serious flaws” and argues that the first scene “seems to establish little, other than perhaps that prior to the war Weinraub led a carefree bohemian life.” In Cinemascope Privett offers a long list of justifications, some convincing, some not. Gitai probably hasn’t helped his case by saying that these sequences are his way of saying “Make love not war.”
