Presenting the world premiere of The Vanishing Soldier – which competes in the main category inLocarno Film Festival76 – is not only the director, producer and leads, but also the film’s crew. A solidarity that testifies to what can be sensed from the very first shots: this is a work made from the heart.
Dani Rosenberg has directed the film; his second feature after The Death Of Cinema and My Father Too, which had been selected in the unlucky Cannes 2020 edition. If the previous movie was an intimate story representing a son and his sick father trying to freeze time through cinema, his new feature doesn’t let go of this family ambience. Only it embroils it with a scathing critique to the army, here tinged with Israeli blue and white but actually applicable to any flag.
The film is set between Gaza and Tel Aviv. Two places within an hour of each other, yet at the antipodes. The first is dirty, overcrowded, barren, bloody and tattered. The second, on the other hand, is alive, dynamic, rich, and clean: a place where bombings can be a backdrop to the hustle and bustle of life or to the tourists relaxing on the beach.
Amongst the fog of the fights on the Gaza Strip, the protagonist is firstly introduced to the audience. He’s an 18-year-old soldier who flees his own unit during an attack. Because his fellow soldiers are nearby, but his home is not far enough away for him to give up the idea of leaving. All he has to do is run fast for a while and there he is: no longer staying himself with the red of blood but with that of the watermelon from his family’s garden, which he now greedily devours in the company of his lifelong dog.
The camera pursues him, in a constant coming and going that is the film’s hallmark. Sometimes it lets him go off into the distance, only to pick him up again and stay on him: its breath on his neck and its eyes on him as well as the spotlight of an entire country that will soon be looking for the missing soldier whose name no one initially knows.
The audience does, as it’s been pronounced so well by his sweet girlfriend when he finally meets her: “Schlomi”. She says it with that tone of astonishment, candor and embarrassment that only teenage loves can have. After all, that is the reason why he has come back: to say goodbye to her before she leaves Tel Aviv for college, or perhaps to convince her not to go.
Between a hospital visit to his father, family encounters, sometimes even happy moments, second thoughts, anxieties, romantic and then nightmarish times, the film takes on several different tones but orchestrated by a direction that is well amalgamated and never mechanical. Slapstick chases that stretch to Buster Keaton-esque paradoxical moments and the mood of US paranoia thriller, finally blend in something resembling the aimless wandering of the protagonist of some of the French New Wave cinema. Schlomi is in fact somehow ascribable to the category of characters such as Antoine Doinel of The 400 Blows: they flee momentarily from something to which they must return, and in this flight they discover so much about life that they will never be the same again.
They become adults.
That’s why The Vanishing Soldier is also a coming of age that takes place in 24 hours.
For much of the film, Schlomi will try to hide from the authorities- while his worried mother urges him to return to his unit (“they will forgive you”). But now, without the camouflage uniform and dressed as a tourist, the soldier looks just like any other guy: (too) young and clean-shaven to give away that he might have witnessed the horror he surely has witnessed.
But the IDF takes the disappearance of his “forces” very seriously, and the assumption is that the soldier cannot have vanished: he must have been kidnapped by the enemy. Therefore, an infallible plan is set in motion in order to find him. Nothing new but the usual machine of war, a formula that repeats itself.
From this moment, the protagonist takes on almost Dostoyevskian overtones: torn by a sense of responsibility and guilt not for abandoning an army he does not believe in, but because this has led to a chain reaction of deaths, including civilians in Gaza. Hence, the decision to go back: the last part of the film is effectively a rewind of the first.
In this tragicomic one-day journey, romance, drama, hope, and Kafkaesque mood mingle in the humidity of Tel Aviv summer, culminating on the finale in a powerful explosion of semi-grotesque that proves how Rosenberg’s focus is not (only) on the injustice and brutality of war, but more on the dullness of it, and that bewildering blindness that follows.
More specifically, he perfectly captures the discontent of the young generation of Israelis who are questioning the values of the militaristic system they live in, and are opening their eyes and fighting for their rights. They are starting to say “No”.
That’s why – despite everything – this is still a film full of hope, which often resides in young people.
Ido Tako’s performance is indeed quite revealing: he’s an actor to watch out for and whom we will surely see again on the big screen – just as the supporting actress Mika Reiss.
Both in their feature film debut, the purity and sincerity of their acting constitute the greatness of the film. Their honest emotions, the small joys they can still cling onto and the fears they share stand out like a flower blooming in the desert.
It does comfort us in trusting that – so long as two young lovers exist in the world, sensibility and humanity can win over geopolitics.
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