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Countdown To Terror
Israel's Blank Bullet is an Israeli drama
inspired by Rabin assassination.
Michael Fox
Special to the Jewish News
I
sraeli filmmaker Haim Bouzaglo's
dramatic 2011 feature film, Blank
Bullet, evokes the rare and disquiet-
ing experience of a country having a
national nervous breakdown.
Such a spectacle can be profoundly
harrowing if the underlying real-world
political issues are handled skillfully, or
excitingly entertaining if the film doesn't
take itself too seriously. Blank Bullet leans
a tad toward melodrama even as it relent-
lessly pulls us through its weighty series
of events.
Blank Bullet is set in 2005 as Ariel
Sharon is preparing to implement his
decision to disengage from Gaza and
remove thousands of Israeli settlers.
We're dropped into the cauldron via an
overheated montage of newsreel footage
invoking the murder of Yitzhak Rabin
a decade earlier, suicide bombers and
crowds of angry protestors.
An array of death threats has con-
vinced the prime minister to avoid
public appearances with the exception
of a ceremony at Yad Vashem three days
hence. The shaved-head chief of the Shin
Bet (Israel's secret service), Amos Snir,
is convinced that's where an attempt on
Sharon's life will take place.
Meanwhile, Bouzaglo (who directed
the landmark 1990 Lebanon war drama
Time for Cherries) has introduced several
other characters and storylines. Although
we don't realize it at first, they represent
potential assassins of the prime minister.
There's the radical young leader of a
group of religious settlers, whom we meet
in the ambulance speeding his pregnant
wife to a hospital following her shooting
by Palestinians.
There's the mysterious doctor who
saves her life and is oddly obsessed with
another patient in a coma.
Don't forget the charming Israeli Arab
who, beaten by the police and rejected by
his Jewish girlfriend, impulsively vows
revenge. (He's also the caretaker of Snir's
elderly father, a coincidence that strains
credulity but is necessary for certain late-
in-the-game plot turns.)
Finally, there's the Moroccan woman
romantically involved with a high-
ranking terrorist, though her motives for
murder remain inscrutable.
The potential is there for a fluid,
Altman-esque weaving of three-dimen-
sional people and plot lines that generate
both thematic connections and genuine
tension. Indeed, Bouzaglo hits that ambi-
tious mark a good portion of the time.
Unfortunately, the potential assassins,
and the Shin Bet team assembled by
Snir (veteran actor Amos Lavi, who died
shortly after the film was completed),
aren't given enough speeches of persua-
sive rhetoric, thrilling bluster or moral
force.
Curiously, Blank Bullet barely men-
tions the disengagement after the open-
ing sequences and never addresses the
implications or alludes to the repercus-
sions of Sharon's strategy. Now there's
nothing wrong with a good thriller,
of course, but some viewers may feel
that that the filmmaker is exploiting
high-stakes reality for entertainment
purposes.
That feeling is exacerbated by the lone
woman on Snir's handpicked team, a
"profiler" who wears off-the-shoulder
tops to meetings and derives more plea-
sure from flirting with her co-workers
than preventing the assassination.
The soundtrack, which evokes a '70s
made-for-TV action movie, doesn't help,
nor does the slow-motion climax at Yad
Vashem, which undercuts the would-be
poignant ending.
Blank Bullet holds our interest right to
the end and raises pithy questions about
Israel's security and the fallible human
beings who are entrusted with it.
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