Due to the renewed interest of the public in the conflict at the middle east, some filmmakers tried pushing and pulling a political pendulum when it comes to accepting / boycotting Israeli film-makers. It is known that film-makers ( being in the art of empathy ) usually tend to be on a progressive side. That makes a concept of an "Israeli filmmaker" a rather strange thing to fathom. But since we see filmmakers from far more restrictive parts of the middle-east find ways to speak their true minds about complex topics, despite heavy censorship, there is no shortage of progressive Israeli films. One of them Zero Motivation ( אפס ביחסי אנוש ), a tale about IDF itself, has some rather interesting points. No... Not the ones you might expect.

And then we have a chapter that combines the two girls ( Daffi and Zohar ) from the beginning into one. But given the writing, the whole situation is now utterly up-side down. Thought, it seems like chapter 3 is technically not about the 2 girls at all. But about their commander Rama ( Sheiny Klein שני קליין ).

The Hebrew poster for the movie contains an image of 3 girls: Daffi, Zohar and Rama. Therefor it must be that at least to some extent, the 3 chapters were meant to represent these 3 girls.

Now with the third chapter, we have a complication. Technically it is about the reunion of Daffi and Zohar. But is also about the rejection of Rama. She herself wanted to be more consequential, but got rejected by the higher ranking officers. In the scene where she receives the bad news, she asks them "Is it because I'm a woman?".

Chapter 2 thrown me off a bit. It had a voice-over narration, while the other 2 chapters didn't have it ( or had very little of it ). I get it. It is private stuff. She wants to get rid of her virginity. But there are cinematic techniques to do it in a "show don't tell" way. Look no further than Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. Though, credit where credit is due, Talya Lavie's voice-over writing is full of character quarks, making it way more serviceable. Which kind of begs the question: why didn't she do that on the entire film?

What I was rather baffled by, was how dark the movie was. Not dark, in the emotional sense. Dark, in the sense of, the screen is black and you can't see shit. Like come on... just adding a bit of smoke machine here and there, or a bounce light here and there, would have improved the damn thing significantly.