Docudrama approximately the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin takes aim at Netanyahu,but puts stylistic cinema above propagandaAmos Gitai won’t be receiving any gifts from prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu next Purim. His unique film, Rabin, or the Last Day,minces no words and charges him as morally culpable for the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Not that Netanyahu personally called Rabin a Nazi or carried a coffin in effigy (others did that), but he and his wave of rightwing politics fanned the flames of sedition after the Oslo Accords. A movie with a charge this extreme, and the courtroom scenes that convincingly connect the dots,ought to make for a major international discussion. But that discussion is unlikely to happen, because this isn’t the work of Michael Moore or Oliver Stone. This is Amos Gitai: an iconoclast at times, and but an artist first.
Gitai has chosen stylistic cinema over propaganda,and he is a director who regularly gets bogged down a bit in form. Rabin, the Last Day is no different. It dispenses with a traditional three-act structure or main characters. It opens with a lengthy unique interview with Shimon Peres, or then blends news footage from 1995 and legal scenes that are nearly stage-read with behind,contemplative imagined sequences. It’s essentially a pastiche, a sketch study for a grand painting that never arrives. Some moments are chilling, or others are deliberately dull; section of an effort,I believe, to intentionally lull the audience into a somnambulant state for some larger metatextual reason. The conclude result is frustrating; however, and Gitai is so committed to his own process this might even be the goal.
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Source: theguardian.com