Grim Realism : War Film by Israel Army: No Heroes

You could have heard a pin drop when the lights came back on in the screening room and everyone waited for Maj. Gen. Moshe Levy’s verdict.

Levy, Israel’s military chief of staff, had just seen a very different army educational film--a feature-length dramatization, not a documentary or a conventional training film, about the moral complexities of Israel’s war in Lebanon. It had turned out so much better than expected that someone had proposed that it be released commercially, for general audiences in Israel and abroad.

The Israeli soldiers in the film were not the bold, self-assured heroes of military propaganda. They were often confused, frightened, vengeful and blundering.

To director Eli Cohen, it seemed like forever before Levy finally broke the silence.

‘Have to Sleep on It’

“I’ll have to sleep on it,” he said.

And sleep on it he did, for two months. In the interim, more generals saw the film, as did Minister of Defense Yitzhak Rabin. There was debate. In the end, though, the defense Establishment approved, and the film, titled “Ricochets,” is scheduled for general release here later this month.

It made its debut before an international audience at the recent film festival in Cannes.

“Ricochets” is less political than it might have been if it had been made by an independent producer. And it does not make nearly as powerful a statement as anti-Vietnam War films like “Apocalypse Now” and “The Deer Hunter.” But it is nonetheless remarkable that in a nation so obsessed with security the army would produce so self-critical a film.

Painful to Watch

A man whose son was among the more than 650 Israeli soldiers killed in Lebanon called it “the most realistic film yet about the war” and, although it was painful for him to watch, one of the best Israeli films he has seen in his 20 years here.

Levy said young Israelis who had served in Lebanon told him that the film showed far better than they could describe to their friends and relatives what it was really like.

“Ricochets” is based on the experience of a battle-weary platoon in the last days before Israel withdrew most of its troops from Lebanon in June, 1985. (A small Israeli force and an allied, mostly Christian Lebanese militia still control a “security zone” extending up to 10 miles north of the frontier into southern Lebanon.)

The Men Who Fought

The film skips over the political background of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June, 1982, and the costly three-year occupation that followed. It looks at the war through the eyes of the men who fought it.

Cohen calls it a film about “people in a war without the only luxury war can give--the knowledge of who is ‘good’ and who is ‘bad.’ ”

It is clear from the start that the film will pull few punches. In the opening scene, an Israeli officer is shot to death by a carload of Lebanese gunmen after he stops their vehicle on a lonely road.

As one of the characters, Georgie, notes, Lebanon is a country where everyone hates everyone else, but they all hate the Israelis most. Later, Georgie has to be restrained when he goes berserk one night on guard duty.

Hardened by the War

Another Israeli officer, hardened by the war, tells an idealistic but inexperienced colleague that he would rather see 100 Lebanese suffer than endanger one of his own men.

In one scene, Israeli troops, following what became standard practice in Lebanon, fire blindly from ambush at movement in nearby bushes, accidentally killing a Lebanese boy whom one of them had earlier befriended.

One of the major reasons “Ricochets” is so realistic is that it was filmed in southern Lebanon. To anyone who has been there, the potholed roads and collapsed buildings are instantly recognizable as the real thing.

The actors and the technical crew were all either regular soldiers or reservists, and all but a handful of the Lebanese characters in the film are residents of Khiam, a mostly Muslim village about five miles north of the Israeli border settlement at Metulla.

Director Cohen is a civilian who has made a number of documentaries under contract for the army. But the producer, Lt. Col. Ely Dory, is a career soldier. As head of the army’s film unit, Dory is responsible for turning out 10 to 12 hours of film every year, film that is used for recruiting and training.

Cohen and Dory conceived “Ricochets” as a way to provoke discussion among young officers and soldiers who might face ambiguous situations in battle. They took the script to Gen. Levy and he gave them a conditional go-ahead, saying, in effect, “We’ll see what you come up with.”

For a time, Cohen said, there was talk of shelving the final product, but there was no attempt to alter the dialogue or to cut or add scenes in order to make the film more “acceptable.”

Maybe this was because the film left most of the central questions up to the viewer to decide. Even Dory and Cohen see it differently.

Producer Dory, the military man, said he wanted the film to show that, whatever the situation, the Israeli fighting man “is a human soldier.”

But Director Cohen, the civilian, sees the climactic scene as not clear-cut. In it, the protagonist, Lt. Gadi, has his chief antagonist, Abu Nabil, trapped with a follower in a house where there are civilians as well. Should he blast the gunmen out with sheer firepower, endangering the innocent people in the process? Or should he try to isolate the gunmen, increasing the risk to his own men?

Gadi takes a third path. He leaves his men behind and rushes the house alone.

To Cohen, this is not heroism.

“Gadi’s solution is the result of weakness and despair,” Cohen said. “He can’t decide between two alternatives, both of them difficult to accept, and he prefers a quasi-suicidal act as a solution.”

Cohen said he not only understands his character’s indecision but shares it. And because he could not make up his mind which course Gadi should have taken, “I didn’t kill him,” Cohen said with a sheepish smile.