Watch it with us: Netflix streaming
When I came across the plot summary for Zero Motivation on Netflix, I had to read it a couple of times to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. “As they serve out their required term, an all-female unit of the Israeli army battles boredom and personal frictions at a remote desert outpost.” Come again? Workplace comedies, at least of the big-screen variety, are historically the provenance of male characters. A handful of films in the ’80s and ’90s focused on women in the workplace: Working Girl, 9 to 5, Private Benjamin, and the often-overlooked Clockwatchers. But for these women, a job is a means to an end, and the end is always marriage.
I say this to highlight the miraculous oddity that is Zero Motivation. The fact that it’s a workplace comedy about women in the Israeli army is astonishing on its own. But the comedic elements have more in common with Clerks and Office Space than with Private Benjamin, the only other comedy I could come up with that focused on a woman in the military. That film is a classic fish-out-of-water story and it is pleasant enough, but Zero Motivation takes the fact that women serve in the military for granted and instead focuses on the mind-numbing ennui that sets in when you’re assigned a boring and seemingly pointless task and simply told to obey or else.
Continue reading →
