‘Why War’ Review: Amos Gitai’s Rumination on Conflict Lacks Specificity
variety.comSiddhant Adlakha “Why War” is both the title of Amos Gitai‘s latest and a question that has long been on the director’s mind — one he has tried to answer with works like “A Letter to a Friend in Gaza” and “West of the Jordan River.” However, this seemingly direct confrontation of the query takes a roundabout path, resulting in a movie about helplessness, frustration and intellectual debate in the face of military conflict.
It is based, in part, on written correspondences between Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, and takes an experimental, meta-fictional form, though its images can’t help but feel trepidatious, if not entirely without purpose.
Through staged scenes of battles from antiquity (one of which appears to be the First Jewish-Roman War), Gitai paves a fiery path for his rumination, though his methodology quickly proves too broad for his subject matter.
Early in its runtime, the film features images from the heart of Israel, of art installations about the events of October 7, and numerous posters of Israeli hostages, alongside the slogan most associated with them: “Bring them home.” Any subsequent inquiry into war, therefore, stems from this contemporary context, but the approach “Why War” takes is often too vague for a film that demands specificity. (Without shots of the aforementioned installations, it would be a different work entirely).
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