Kippur

Kippur is a war film we recommend, with a warning that its strongest scenes are also its hardest to watch. Amos Gitai follows a first-aid team after the surprise attack of 1973, making the effort to help the wounded the centre of our attention. There is enough drama in that work without treating every useful act as a heroic achievement. The battlefront sequences are forceful because being able to do something for another person offers so little protection from what is happening around them.

Liron Levo plays Weinrub, with Tomer Russo as Ruso and Uri Klauzner as Klausner. The performances make sense within a film concerned with people trying to be useful under conditions they cannot control. We were shaken by the first-aid work at the battlefront, where the danger does not recede just because someone needs medical help. The director gives that simple, dreadful predicament enough attention for us to feel how little these men can take for granted while doing their jobs.

Renato Berta’s cinematography gives these passages their uncomfortable immediacy. We feel close to the work, without the pleasurable sense of command that an action sequence can offer. Miguel Markin’s production design also serves the practical demands of the scenes: the battlefront feels like a place in which people must function, despite having little control over it. The result is convincing without requiring us to stop and admire how convincingly the war has been recreated.

Editors Monica Coleman and Kobi Netanel make the accumulating strain count. The time spent with the team feels necessary because the job itself is difficult enough to hold our attention, without an extra dramatic reward attached to every passage. Jan Garbarek’s music adds to the unease, although the film scarcely needs further help in making this situation distressing. At 117 minutes, Kippur asks for sustained attention, and the battlefront material earns it.

The opening with Weinrub and his girlfriend is the clear weakness. A glimpse of private life ought to give us a person to hold on to when the fighting begins, but this introduction feels detached from what makes the rest of the film persuasive. The writing by Amos Gitai and Marie-Jose Sanselme is stronger when the first-aid team’s task gives the scenes a direct purpose. We would lose little by arriving at that work sooner; the opening delays our involvement.

The focus on first aid matters to how we judge the courage on display. Helping somebody is worthwhile even when it cannot make the larger situation any less appalling, and the film lets that be enough. Viewers tired of being asked to enjoy the machinery of battle will find something worth their attention here. Watch Kippur if you can bear to spend an evening with the people left to deal with the damage.