Yossi & Jagger [DVD]

Description

An Israeli military outpost serves as the staging ground for this theatrical and tragic love story between Yossi (Ohad Knoller) and Jagger (Yehuda Levi), young soldiers in the Israeli army. Yossi, the stolid captain of the outpost, and Jagger, nicknamed after the Rolling Stones front man, are lovers, but they struggle to hide their relationship from the rest of the troop. Private excursions through snowy trails serve to camouflage their trysts, but Jagger becomes dissatisfied with their secrecy, adding tension to this dynamic short film. Unlike action-oriented war movies, YOSSI & JAGGER focuses more on the mundane activities of military service--scenes of ditch-digging, cooking, snowball fights, and an ad-hoc outpost dance party born from boredom and anxiety figure largely in the film--resulting in a realistic and less sensationalist account of war. Because the soldiers never identify the enemy by name, barely mentioning the existence of one at all, the viewer may speculate if their enemy is real, or is perhaps even the soldiers themselves. Eventually, however, they are called upon to ambush this invisible and unidentified enemy, and the film shifts gears, providing us with the violence a war always brings. But the combat yields an ironic and fatal twist, one quite unlike the American films that Yossi and Jagger frequently satirize.

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