Review: Hijacking political thriller ‘7 Days in Entebbe’ is larger than life
The gripping political thriller “7 Days in Entebbe” – based on true events and directed by Brazilian filmmaker Jose Padilha – opens, somewhat surprisingly, with a modern dance performance. It’s a captivating choice that serves as an unlikely thematic throughline of the film about a high-stakes high-wire act of negotiation and military operation during a tumultuous period between Israel and Palestine in the late 1970s.
Performed by the Batsheva Dance Company, choreographed by Ohad Naharin, the dancers flail and stumble out of chairs, dressed in suits, and rip their clothes off in a rhythmic, repetitive ritual. The dance has a place in the narrative, as one of the dancers (Zina Zinchenko) is the girlfriend of an Israeli special forces soldier (Ben Schnetzer), but it has a larger place in the film emotionally and symbolically. It represents a sense of anxiety and chaos, a mob mentality. As dancers wrestle with chairs and clothes in unison, one dancer falls, again and again. She can’t – or won’t – get in formation with the group.
Written by Geoffrey Burke, “7 Days in Entebbe” recounts the tale of a real plane hijacking that looms large in the history of Israel. In June 1976, two German and two Palestinian revolutionaries – the nomenclature varies from “freedom fighter” to “terrorist” depending on who you ask – hijacked an Air France flight from Tel Aviv to Paris and directed it to Entebbe, Uganda, to demand the release of 52 political prisoners.
The smart script by Burke weaves together the happenings at the terminal in Uganda, emceed by an ebullient Idi Amin (Nonso Anozie), just happy for the media exposure, as well as the political distress in Jerusalem as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (Lior Ashkenazi) struggles for power with his Defense Minister Shimon Peres (Eddie Marsan). But much of the story focuses on the morally complex situation of the two Germans, Brigitte Kuhlmann (Rosamund Pike) and Wilfried Bose (Daniel Bruhl).
For these young European revolutionaries, they are just far enough away from the Holocaust, and just geographically removed enough from real oppression, that the event is where the rubber meets the road – where rhetoric becomes action, which is often grimy, complicated and disturbing. Wracked by guilt, Bvse proclaims, “I’m not a Nazi!” but then again, he’s a German, hijacking Jews. His counterpart, Brigitte, is much tougher, chomping speed pills and unafraid to use violence to make her hostages fall in line. Pike is haunting in her performance, her Brigitte both faraway and ferocious.
A climatic moment intercuts a special forces military operation led by Yonatan Netanyahu (Angel Bonanni), older brother of future prime minister Benjamin, with the pulse-pounding dance of the opening. With so many moving parts and unpredictable forces, the entire hostage crisis is a dance, with all the pieces needing to come together perfectly for anyone, on any side to prevail. It’s a delicate balance of choreography and chaos, of ideas and action.
The story is larger than life, and difficult to believe it even happened. Padilha brings a frenetic, authentic style and flair to this depiction, and never loses sight of its larger messages and themes. As Rabin, Ashkenazi drives home the point that without negotiation, they will always be at war. It’s poignant and powerful to consider the ways in which negotiation between Israel and Palestine reverberated throughout the lives and careers of Rabin and Peres, and the history of conflict in the Middle East, which stretches back to Europe. The film never lets us forget that legacy.