ISRAELI FILM FESTIVAL: Set in 1956, the over-long Infiltration is an Israeli take on the military training drama best known to modern audiences via Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket and reprised more recently by Joel Schumacher in Tigerland.
Anyone making a film in a familiar genre needs to bring a new element or approach, something to defamiliarise the material, and here the novelty comes from the fact the platoon members are either physically unfit or mentally disabled. In Full Metal Jacket terms, they’re all (or virtually all) Gomer Pyles.
The film’s title, Infiltration, refers to a training exercise in which the hapless recruits are ordered to storm a hill while being fired upon by their commanding officers with live ammunition. It’s just one of a series of absurd scenarios set up by writer-director Dover Koshashvili and co-writer Reuven Hecker (working from Yehoshua Kenaz’s source novel) to illustrate the sadism and humiliation this kind of story relies upon.
Further examples include a private remiss at guard duty punished by being put on sentry in a bed placed outside the men’s sleeping quarters. Another soldier – this time through no fault of his bullying commanding officers – suffers the humiliation of a mother waiting for him at the camp gates.
While acted by a perfectly capable ensemble, the film has a number of issues, the first of which is tone. In the hands of, say, a Hungarian director, this might have made a fruitfully deadpan black comedy. A scene where a soldier accidentally tosses a hand grenade backwards so that it explodes near his platoon mates could, for example, be played as drolly humorous or as horrifying, but it’s hard to discern Koshashvili’s attitude towards his material.
Something that’s also hard to figure is exactly what physical or mental problems each of these men are meant to be suffering beyond one having a skin disease and another being an epileptic. The issues that landed the rest of the privates in this platoon-for-misfits remain a mystery, ditto the military reasoning behind keeping such a motley crew in the army in the first place. While there’s a discussion over whether or not they’ll be expected to serve in combat roles, this is never clearly resolved.
On a structural level the episodic script suffers from the lack of an overarching narrative to bind the sections together, given the running time of nearly two hours, it’s quite a problem. Especially odd is the decision to throw in a romantic subplot half way through, when a pair of characters, let out of boot camp on leave, attend a domestic social event – it’s a jarringly out-of-place sequence that seems to have wandered in from another film entirely.
But perhaps this reviewer’s lack of first-hand experience of Israeli society is at issue
when it comes to decoding its sub-textual layers. The festival’s publicity material informs us the soldiers include Ashkenazim (European Jews) and Sephardim (non-European), 'religious and secular, those from kibbutzim and those from the cities, Holocaust survivors and those born in Israel".
Only one of these is made explicit via a character given a hard time because of his commander’s inferiority complex towards kibbutz dwellers. Other elements of social observation may be obvious in Kenaz’s source novel, but non-Israeli film viewers coming afresh to the material may not find the references to be obvious.
