Zero Motivation – Bitch Flicks

What were the biggest challenges in making a feature film? How do people see compulsory military service in Israel? Was that Russian girl really possessed by a ghost? Writer/director Talya Lavie answers our questions about her award-winning film.

Zero Motivation, which won Best Narrative Feature at the Tribeca Film Festival, is a dark slacker comedy set in the Israeli military. You can read our review of it here.

The first feature-length film from writer-director Talya Lavie, Zero Motivation was inspired by her own military service. In the Director’s Note found in the movie’s press kit, Lavie writes that “Israeli women may of course serve in more glamorous roles, like pilots or tank crew instructors. But I wanted to focus on us office girls, the unseen and mostly ignored majority whose contribution is lacking any social or symbolic value.”

While promoting the film’s release in New York, she took the time to follow up on that statement, and to answer a few of our questions.

Bitch Flicks: Most of our readers are from the US and Canada, where the concept of mandatory military service is a little bit foreign, so I’m wondering if you could expand on that statement and talk about how you see the role of female conscripts in the Israeli military.

Lavie: Israel is one of the only countries that has mandatory military service for women as well as men. It creates a paradox because, on the one hand, it’s a symbol of equality but, at the same time, the IDF… still demonstrates real gender discrimination. There are women in combat roles but, as I said, the majority of women are still doing secretarial jobs. I believe this may change only if the army becomes less central in Israeli society – hopefully one day.

BF: In many ways, this is a coming of age story, but one that takes place within a very specific setting. (How) do you think that serving in the military has influenced the way these characters define themselves and develop as individuals?

Lavie: In a way, the army for those characters is what college is for Americans. Everyone participates and accepts it as a fact. It is, though, challenging to define your individual identity while having to wear the same uniform as everyone else, and to [live under these] rules. I guess it influences each person in a different way, like every other thing in life.

BF: While the film is very funny, there are a few darker moments in the story. How did you go about managing the changes in tone in the film?

Lavie: The film is defined as a “dark comedy” but, while writing the script, I didn’t want to lock myself into a specific genre. I put a large [range] of emotions in it, and was interested in mixing different spirits. Ultimately, my greatest challenge was to maintain the specific subtle tone of the film; to balance the transitions between humor, sadness, nonsense and seriousness. I felt like an acrobat in a circus walking on a rope, trying not to fall off, and yet to keep the film’s free spirit.

BF: I think the sequence where Irena is “possessed” by the spirit of the dead girl works really well on a metaphorical level, but inquiring minds want to know – was she really possessed by a ghost?

Lavie: All of the characters in the film have a very detailed biography that is not told in the movie – none of them gives a personal monologue. But their background is hinted at in many ways. In Irena’s character, we tried to hint that she has a history of violence. And when she sees Zohar nearly raped, it brings a very strong reaction out of her. Is she really possessed? I leave it for each viewer to decide for himself.

BF: What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in making this film, and do you have any advice for aspiring filmmakers?

Lavie: The biggest challenge was raising the budget for the film. It took several years. That stage in the creation of a film can be very frustrating for any first time filmmaker. My advice for filmmakers at this point is, in addition to applying anywhere you can, use that waiting time for learning and preparing for shooting. Eventually, when I look back on the process, that waiting period was frustrating but also useful for rewriting and studying. I came to the set very prepared. And since we had a very short time for shooting, [being prepared] was significant.

Thank you to Talya Lavie for taking the time to speak with us. Zero Motivation is currently playing in New York, San Francisco, Toronto, and other select cities in North America.

Written by Katherine Murray.

Despite having familiar themes of disaffected youth in dead-end jobs, Zero Motivation is one of those rare, uniquely positioned films that couldn’t have been made by anybody else. Writer and director Tayla Lavie draws on her own experience in the Israeli military to tell a dryly funny and sometimes shocking story about female conscripts who have neither the skill nor the will to serve in the army.

Israel is currently the only country (other than Eritrea, whose conscription practices may be considered a human rights abuse) where women over the age of 18 are required to serve in the military. Norway is making plans to include women in its mandatory service, but it hasn’t happened yet.

The characters of Zero Motivation are, then, 18-20-year-old female conscripts who’ve completed basic training and been assigned to a remote base where they work in “Human Resources” as secretaries. Daffi, who still wears jelly bracelets and writes letters to headquarters begging to be reassigned, has been given the job of office paper shredder. Her best friend, Zohar, sorts the mail.

The characters in this movie (for the most part) are just marking time until their two years are up – although their superiors allude to Israel’s conflict with its neighbours, and to soldiers who’ve been killed in action, we see that lower-level support staff are not particularly involved or invested in what’s happening. For them, this is more like Office Space or Clerks than Full Metal Jacket or The Thin Red Line.

That contrast, while not the focal point of the movie, adds another layer of interest to the already familiar situation of seeing disaffected youth in dead-end jobs. There are two scenes in particular where the secretaries’ commanding officer – also a woman – attends an important meeting about military strategy, and then leaves during the most interesting part of the discussion because she has to find out why the coffee isn’t ready.

There’s another scene where the same commanding officer is about to give a speech that she’s clearly worked hard on preparing and, during the only moment that her male superiors are paying attention to her, they’re all called away to an emergency. She never gets to say what she’d planned and, poignantly, she seems resigned to being unimportant.

It’s hard to say how much a role gender plays in the situation depicted in Zero Motivation, but I’ve had the experience of working in organizations where the departments perceived as least important somehow filled up with women, who were then ignored. I’ve also seen firsthand how support staff – who also tend to be women – are sometimes treated as a necessary evil rather than a vital part of the team.

The situation in Zero Motivation is unique to Israel in that the characters are conscripted for two years after turning eighteen, but, in more broad and general terms, it’s an experience that many young people and women have, around the world, of being pushed into jobs with low levels of responsibility, where they’re treated with low levels of respect.

Zero Motivation is primarily a comedy that’s based on watching Zohar rebel against any suggestion that she should try to do a good job in the army. As with any slacker comedy, we understand why she’s not interested in serving a system that tells her all she’s capable of is sorting mail (and then looks down on her for sorting it), and we cheer for her when she finds ways to get out of doing work.

The primary conflict – which starts simmering in the first of the movie’s three chapters, and explodes in chapter three – comes from the fact that Daffi, motivated by the desire to transfer to a better post in Tel-Aviv, sells out to the man by becoming an officer.

Suddenly, she and Zohar are at odds over whether they should take their dumb jobs seriously, and Daffi is placed in the same kill-joy position as the secretaries’ commanding officer. In order to advance her own career, she needs the group not to be total screw-ups, and she’s frustrated that there’s no way to convince them to try.

As the ringleader of the screw-ups, Zohar is resentful that Daffi chose to buy into the system at the expense of their friendship, and refuses to accept that she has any authority after she’s commissioned.

Together, they act out the age-old struggle between trying to fight the system, and trying to work within it. And, while it could be taking place in any Western workplace, the fact that it’s taking place in the army sends an extra message – that this is what you get when you fill the ranks with people who don’t want to be there and treat them like crap. You get the same thing as you get at the McDonalds counter.

The middle section of the movie, which takes place while Zohar’s left to fend for herself, and Daffi’s away at officer training, is the one that veers the farthest from the through line, but also includes the most direct discussion of gender.

The middle section is about Zohar trying to lose her virginity, on the advice of her Russian co-worker, Irena. The story takes a surprising (and surreal) turn, however, when Irena becomes possessed by the spirit of another girl who killed herself after a boy was mean to her. Spirit-possessed Irena follows Zohar around in a trance, ruining her date with a male paratrooper, and – in one of the movie’s darker turns – saving her from an attempted rape.

The spirit possession is never explained in non-supernatural terms, but it makes sense on a metaphorical level – that, after giving Zohar bad advice to hook up with any random dude she can find, Irena remembers what happened to the last girl who did that, and undoes her bad advice by protecting Zohar from getting hurt.

The entire middle sequence is more a coming-of-age story than a workplace comedy, and it serves the purpose of making Zohar more sympathetic due to showing us her vulnerability, while also driving home the point that these are teenagers, who are still figuring out things like sex and relationships. They did not magically become mature, worldly adults when someone put a rifle in their hands.

What’s interesting about Zero Motivation, from a foreigner’s perspective, is that military service is taken for granted as part of the same right of passage – something that follows secondary school, the way freshman year of college follows secondary school in the USA. The army is a place where young people go when they’re still trying to figure out who they are and what they want to do with their lives.

While that’s true of many young people in countries other than Israel, Israel’s unique conscription policies have created the backdrop for a story that has a singular point of view, and a voice that’s not often heard in cinema.

Zero Motivation is worth seeing on its merits as an entertaining comedy, but it’s also worth seeing as something that adds to the cultural conversation by contributing something we don’t usually hear.

Katherine Murray is a Toronto-based writer who yells about movies and TV on her blog.

Tag: Zero Motivation

Spirit Possession and Military Service: Talya Lavie Talks to Us About ‘Zero Motivation’

‘Zero Motivation’: A Female Slacker Comedy Set in the Israeli Army