A group of teens fall in love, get jealous, sneak off to make love, party, dance and joke around. This could easily be a recipe for a romance movie or Animal House-type college romp, but for the fact that we're looking at members of the Israeli Defense Force.
Born into war, these kids view their military service almost like high school. TThey're exhausted, stuck near the Lebanese border in the freezing cold.
Commander Yossi (Ohad Knoller) goes on a mission with his second-in-command, Jagger (Yehuda Levi), and as soon as they're out of sight, they drop in the snow for a quick kiss.
Jagger wants to announce their affair to the world, but since Yossi longs for an army career, the two men keep it a secret. A female soldier's crush on Jagger, and another soldier's subsequent crush on her, cause something of a nasty love quadrangle among the barracks.
Writer Avner Berenheimer and director Eytan Fox do a remarkable job of cramming genuine emotion in the film's fleeting moments.
The enemy army never even rears its ugly head; it doesn't need to. Yossi & Jagger has already glimpsed the real enemy, and it is our own nature. The economic filmmaking and punchy writing make Yossi & Jagger feel like an old Edgar G. Ulmer or Samuel Fuller B-picture, bursting with vitality and mercifully lacking in grand pretensions about the nature of man and war.