Early on in my service as an I.D.F. soldier, I used to wait every morning at 6 A.M. for the 61 bus to take me from Tel Aviv to a base in nearby Ramat Gan, where I was being trained in the vague capacity of “small-computer operator.” On the bus, I’d grab a seat near the window on the right, to maximize my view of the outside world; the enticing window displays of the international designer shops of the city’s moneyed Kikar Ha’medina area offered a brief respite from the total hold that the I.D.F. had over my day. For a girl like me, performing a tedious, unrewarding office job—as so many women in the I.D.F. do—the Army was a deadening and alienating twenty-two-month experience.
Talya Lavie’s pitch-perfect dark comedy “Zero Motivation,” playing this month at Film Forum, paints a picture of army life similar to the one I remember. Daffi (Nelly Tagar) and Zohar (Dana Ivgi) are two friends doing time on an obscure, ugly base in the south of Israel. Both hate their menial, superfluous office jobs—Daffi is a “paper and shredding N.C.O.,” Zohar a “postal N.C.O.”—and the petty badgering they suffer at the hands of Rama (Shani Klein), their bumbling, ambitious commander. Each has her ways of trying to oppose what amounts to a despised, basically incontrovertible imprisonment. Daffi has hopeless dreams of being transferred to Tel Aviv, to the Kirya, the enormous military base situated at the center of the city, adjacent to the newish Azrieli mall, whose modestly cosmopolitan charms she fantasizes about. (“When you come to visit me, we’ll drink iced coffee,” she tells Zohar.) To this end, she writes tear-stained letters to abstract, high-up Army entities, begging for reassignment. Zohar is more cynical, and her resistance is more disruptive than Daffi’s. Most of her time is spent playing Minesweeper on the office’s depressingly ancient, dust-colored computers and aggressively ignoring the pleas and threats that Rama directs at her.
This story unfolds as a combination of subversive army satire, surreal shtetl Gothic (when a female soldier on the base commits suicide, her ghost purportedly enters the body of one of the office’s surliest administrators), and drab realism. It’s also, winningly, a coming-of-age movie, reminding us that, in Israel, with its universal conscription, new enlistees may be soldiers, but they’re also, for the most part, puerile children, not unlike their counterparts in American high schools and colleges, who make and break friendships and try desperately to lose their virginity. In some key ways, “Zero Motivation” seems to nod to John Hughes’s “The Breakfast Club,” with the foolish but not completely unsympathetic Rama in the role of the scheming, cliché-spouting Mr. Vernon and Zohar in the role of the rebellious Bender. (There’s even a scene that mimics almost exactly the famous “Don’t mess with the bull, young man; you’ll get the horns” bit from Hughes’s movie, with Rama grounding Zohar for consecutive Shabbats, and the base subbing in for Shermer High School’s library as an oppressive detention spot.)
What the movie gets most right is the feel of an I.D.F. office whose military hierarchies blur into an unavoidable, often hostile intimacy, borne of days lived in close quarters with a group of peers thrown together willy-nilly. Being the so-called People’s Army means, perforce, that the I.D.F. won’t really be professional. It’s an Army of endless, casually rude exchanges between colleagues, of petty ass-coverings and stupid, impulsive decisions affecting a largely untrained and unenthusiastic staff, in which an irate junior officer can tell her soldiers to do a hundred ab crunches as punishment in their room, only to see one of them bonk her head on the base of her bunk bed as she halfheartedly gets down on the floor. Military service is a series of stifling, quasi-domestic annoyances rather than a punishing, “Officer and a Gentleman”-like trial of suffering and maturation.
Israel, like America, has a long record of films that deal with the manly, dramatic triumphs and tragedies of army life, from Yosef Milo’s “Hu Halach B’sadot” (1967), starring Moshe Dayan’s handsome son Assi in the role of a tragic soldier whose death on the battlefield is glorified as the ultimate Zionist sacrifice, to Joseph Cedar’s tearjerker “Beaufort” (2007), which is skeptical about the I.D.F.’s long involvement in Lebanon but ultimately makes a case for the Army’s essential decency. Relatively few mainstream Israeli movies entirely leave out the challenges and traumas that Israeli men suffer to protect their country; “B’hinat Bagrut” (1983), a cult movie of my childhood that Assi Dayan co-wrote, dealt with the perils of teen pregnancy, but tacked on a weird subplot about a male soldier killed in Lebanon. The director Eytan Fox’s films from the nineteen-nineties and two-thousands, though mostly focussing on the gay Israeli experience, are also often obsessed with an I.D.F. life that, for all its repressiveness, is still portrayed as heroic.
“Zero Motivation”—which won the top award at the Tribeca Film Festival and became a hit in Israel when it was released there this summer—neither advances nor perpetuates lofty notions of the I.D.F. A combat soldier with romantic-lead potential ends up nearly raping Zohar; Rama’s attempt to snap Zohar out of her apathy with an ideologically empty speech about patriotism and self-sacrifice falls on deaf ears. Men** **exist on the base, doing their own ostensibly important military thing, but they may as well be the adults in “Peanuts,” their voices garbled and inconsequential. In an early scene, Daffi and another female soldier serve coffee to the base’s so-called top brass coffee at its morning meeting, the male officers’ homophobic jokes and professional talk drowned out by a schmaltzy Chopin piano nocturne. (This called to my mind the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, that urbane warrior, who trained as a classical pianist and claimed to have played Chopin before first meeting with Yasir Arafat.) The table is shot from above, “Umbrellas of Cherbourg”-style, the women almost pirouetting, their slow-motion, nimble movements in sardonic contrast to the shabby room and the schlubby Army men.
The protagonists of “Zero Motivation” never engage explicitly with the larger political questions surrounding the I.D.F.—most glaringly, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But this ultimately feels like an honest choice on Lavie's part: when you’re an eighteen-year-old in the Israeli Army, it’s strangely easy to forget about politics altogether. If you’re very lucky, you might find a like-minded friend, or someone cute to make out with. Mostly, like Daffi and Zohar, you’re motivated by thoughts of just getting the hell out.
