Israeli director Joseph Cedar's third feature is a potent adaptation of Ron Leshem's bitterly sardonic novel Im Yesh Gan Eden, published in English as Beaufort. The title refers to the ironically named, Lebanese mountaintop stronghold Beaufort ("beautiful fort"), a 12th-century Crusader castle that has seen hundreds of years of warfare. From 1982 until 2000, Beaufort served as Israel's northernmost military base in Lebanon -- the perfect setting for an angry parable about the futility and eternal nature of war.
Southern Lebanon, 2000. Eighteen years after the Israeli military drove the PLO out of Beaufort on June 6, 1982 -- the first day of the Lebanon War -- and turned the ancient, crumbling fortress into a lonely outpost on the far side of the Lebanese border, the last of the Israeli Defense Forces to man the mountaintop are preparing to return home: After nearly two decades of increasing public protest, Israel is finally leaving Lebanon. Because of a recent bomb explosion, the soldiers have spent the past month waiting for a member of the IDF bomb squad to come and declare the convoy route leading to and from Beaufort safe to reopen. When explosives expert Ziv Faran (Ohad Knoller) finally does arrive, he declares the area too dangerous to approach, but the platoon's temperamental, 22-year-old leader, Liraz Liberti (Oshri Cohen), refuses to wait any longer: Liraz insists Ziv get to work. A second bomb explodes, and Ziv is killed. The incident shakes Liraz and his men, some of whom begin to doubt their emotionally frayed leader it fit to command. As the days wear on and the date of departure nears, Hezbollah begins firing anti-tank missiles directly into the outpost in an attempt to make the Israeli withdrawal look more like a frightened retreat. A frustrated Liraz, however, is ordered by his superiors not to retaliate, but keep his men well inside the protected area for the duration. As the tedium and the terror intensify, so does the sense of futility: The fact that they're about to leave the fortress to Hezbollah anyway only reinforces the feeling that the death and destruction they continue to endure is utterly pointless.
Leshem's bestselling novel is told from the point-of-view of Liraz -- the book takes the form a journal of sorts, filled with the young commander's musings and memories -- but Cedars has taken a much-less subjective approach. We see Liraz from the outside, and consequently get a far more objective look at the effect the boredom, the violence and the frustration of being reduced to "cannon fodder" have had on him. Consequently, the film is also a lot less humorous: Cedar treats the absurdity of the situation as a terrible tragedy rather than a blackly comic treatment of the pointlessness of war. leave a comment --Ken Fox