Deadline: Israeli helmer Amos Gitai is in competition here in Venice with Rabin, The Last Day. The political thriller centers on the official investigation into the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. November 4 will mark 20 years since the killing by a 25-year-old right-wing Israeli who opposed the peace process that Rabin embraced. The film combines staged re-enactments with actual news footage of the shooting and its aftermath. The trailer above includes some graphic moments.
AVClub: Not quite a documentary and not remotely a conventional drama, Amos Gitai’s Rabin, The Last Day spends two-and-a-half enervating hours dissecting the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Unlike the recent docudrama Parkland, which attempted to recreate the aftermath of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in minute detail, Gitai’s film has little or no interest in generating tension or pathos. It’s essentially an investigation, with much of its hefty running time devoted to verbatim reconstructions of testimony delivered before the Shamgar Commission, this tragedy’s equivalent to the Warren Commission. Gitai’s scrupulous dedication to the facts is admirable, especially since he doesn’t hide his lingering sorrow and anger at Rabin’s murder, nor his conviction that the assassination effectively scuttled what might have been real progress toward peace in the Middle East. But the movie is almost literally a trial to watch, demonstrating all the passion and excitement of an unedited C-SPAN broadcast.
Variety: Timed to the 20-year anniversary of Israeli prime minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Amos Gitai’s “Rabin, the Last Day” de-emphasizes the murder itself in favor of the institutional autopsy that followed, blending archival footage with solemn re-enactments of the Shamgar Commission’s official inquiry into the incident. Whereas this tribunal was legally restricted to examining only the “operative acts of negligence” that might have prevented the tragedy, however, Gitai’s rigorously fact-backed film attempts to understand the greater question of “how” — namely, the cultural conditions that made such a violent tragedy possible — and what the incident says about Israel today. It’s a subject perhaps better suited for an essay, done no favors in such flat cinematic form, and the film will ultimately be seen more widely at festivals than by paying auds in any country other the two that co-produced it: Israel and France.
