Alas. The movie was just about sort of okay. "7 Days in Entebbe" turns out to be a fairly conventional “thriller” about the famous Israeli rescue raid in 1976, but the dance number and the film’s none-too-original meditation on the endlessness of the Israeli-Palestinian war over a twice-promised land aspire to give the film some higher calling it doesn’t really live up to.
The dance itself—apart from whether it works within the structure of this otherwise conventional popular movie—is inspired and the choreography is remarkable. Alongside the narrative of the hijacking of an Air France passenger jet by a Palestinian and West German radical left group, and the planning in Israel of a military operation to rescue the hostages, we witness the dance company, one of whose performers is the girlfriend of a soldier who will take part in the rescue raid, polishing its work. Twenty some performers are seated on chairs in an arc and begin, in shadows, to throw their limbs about in sharp synchrony; it has the feel of something disturbingly unnatural, like the ritualized movements of an autistic child, and conveys the sense of being captive to an exhausting, unnatural, and repetitive exercise, one that will never end. But it is at the same time beautiful in its precision—a violent precision, if that is possible, a marvel of synchronized execution, (just like the raid itself, carried out by a unit of Israel’s most fearsome fighters). And over and over, as they rehearse, one of the dancers always falls out, pitches forward from the chair, collapses on the floor.
One soldier, Jonathan Netanyahu (whose letters I first read in my 20s) was killed in the operation. The raid has become legendary, a model for heroic planning and lethal precision. In fact, it did not go off perfectly as planned, and a lot could have gone wrong. The narrative of the preparation for the raid revolves around the endlessness of the war and its inescapability. Like the dancers, one of whom is the girlfriend of a soldier who will take part in the rescue raid, the combatants on both sides are trapped in a repetitive and profoundly unnatural exercise. “I fight so you can dance,” the soldier tells his girlfriend.
Compelling as the choreography is, its juxtaposition with—or its insertion into—a relatively workaday narrative feels slightly forced. The rest of the movie (that’s how distinct these two mechanisms feel; there is the dance and there is the rest of the movie) is a mixed bag. There is at least one really fine performance by Lior Ashkenazi who plays Rabin—cautious, tortured, a former fighter and general who knows the realities of war and is reluctant to commit 200 of his very best men to a mission that might have been calamitous. His military underlings, too, play their part with a plausible verisimilitude.
What is distinctly weird and off-putting, though, is the depiction of Shimon Peres. Played by Eddie Marsan, he looks, first of all, just plain bizarre—over made-up, maybe, or shot at angles that seem to emphasize an odd shape to his head and face. The character is played with an unsmiling, shifty-eyed calculation, meant to convey the sometimes Machiavellian political maneuvering for which Peres was known. (His rivalry with Rabin, who regarded him as an inveterate conniver, is legend among Israelis of that generation.) The effect though is, again, weird; he comes off more like some drugged Manchurian candidate.
A little better is the depiction of the two German terrorists, Bridgette Kuhlman and Wilfred Bose, deluded idealists sidelined in the operation by their Palestinian counterparts who don’t harbor any illusions about the Israeli’s willingness to negotiate. They are plagued by their German-ness, and aware of “how it looks”—Germans singling out Jews for death when it comes time to separate the Israeli passengers of the Air France flight from the others. The portrayal of Kuhlman, especially, hints at the thin border that divides radical idealism and mental illness. For a really electric dissection of that border go see, "The Bader-Meinhof Complex," about the Red Army, the West German underground group of which Kuhlman and Bose’s Revolutionary Cells, was an off-shoot.
The makers of "7 Days in Entebbe" want to tell us something more than a story about a daring rescue mission. It doesn’t really come off. But it did make me want to go learn more about the Batsheva Dance Company.
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