Review: ‘June Zero’ Finds Ideals Mixed With Ashes – The Village Voice

One cannot imagine a worse moment, or at least, a more baffling moment, to release an Israeli film doting on the moral imperatives of the postwar Zionist project, but I’m no film-market prognosticator and maybe sending Jake Paltrow’s June Zero out into the world this summer is a calculated flying-wedge tactic intended to fan the sociopolitical brush fires ignited by Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza. The film was made in 2022, after all — if it wasn’t for Hamas’s attack, we might not be seeing it at all. If released a year ago, the movie wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow; it is ultimately a small piece of work, its earnest appetite for post-Holocaust resistance seasoned with a sharp eye for ground-level ambivalence and moments of irony. Today, though, as even many pro-Israeli Americans are feeling queasy about the amount of wholesale blood shed by their “side,” the movie generally feels like a party-crashing interloper, standing awkwardly in the doorway and muttering righteous slogans, while its occasional sprigs of doubt sound almost prophetic.

Co-writing with Israeli screenwriter Tom Shoval, Paltrow (brother to Gwyneth) revolves several character studies around the last days of Adolf Eichmann, in Jerusalem in 1961 — between his famous trial’s climactic verdict and his eventual cremation, which itself, in a Jewish state, is a vexing dilemma. But we never even see Eichmann’s face; rather, we get to know the Libyan-born adolescent (Koby Aderet) apprenticing with a tough contractor/ex-paramilitary man (Tzahi Grad), who is tasked with building a new oven large enough for the Nazi’s body. (Bury him, the thinking went, and a family claim will be made on the body — any gravesite would become a Nazi shrine.) 

The workers realize that Eichmann’s oven is to be built (for lack of any other reference) via the plans used by the same German manufacturer that built the camp ovens.

We also lean in close to Hayim (Yoav Levi), a Moroccan Jew who serves as  Eichmann’s bodyguard and also manages the crematorium project as the execution approaches, the stress of which turns him inside out. (He must make sure that only Sephardic Jews get a chance to get close to Eichmann, so he isn’t killed impulsively; panicking, he keeps a revolver aimed at a Turkish barber as the scissors come out.) Then it’s on to Poland, not long after, where an Auschwitz survivor (Tom Hagi), who had interrogated Eichmann, leads an inaugural tour group around a devastated ghetto and is forced to justify himself, on the eve of the Holocaust tourist industry, by a Jewish Agency rep (Joy Rieger), who’s intensely skeptical of commercializing the atrocity. Justify himself he does, in a passionate speech about keeping memory alive that plays like the film’s statement of purpose, even given the ambiguity and qualm otherwise on the table.

Paltrow then circles back to the completion of Eichmann’s oven — which, workers realize, is to be built (for lack of any other reference) via the plans used by the same German manufacturer that built the camp ovens. It’s a startling moment of textual irony, doubled-down with subsequent images of smokestacks and shoveled ashes, laying out visually the chilling and oft-unexpressed (in the U.S., anyway) question of how quickly the state of Israel sold out its humanist-democratic ideals and came to echo the fascist/nationalist/racialist violence that begat it. 

A question for some, a statement of gore-stained fact for others, but Paltrow’s film, never mentioning Palestinians per se, doesn’t settle on a point of view. Must it? If you were to try to make this film’s mix of positions gel, you could come away with the sense that the taint on the Israeli project is merely a semi-tragic and even necessary flaw in its heroic machinery, a burden with which we should sympathize. It would not be, among cultures with repressed minorities, an uncommon belief set. For its part, the movie is robustly acted, particularly by Aderet and Levi, and shot with a gimlet eye. (Eichmann’s hanging is seen only in its aftermath, as a pair of tied legs dangling through a doorway, above a puddle of pee.) But this year, if not necessarily in 2022, it’s easy to feel that a movie about the Israeli soul might perhaps require a little more moral courage.  ❖

Michael Atkinson has been writing for the Village Voice since 1994. His latest book is the new edition of his BFI tract on David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.