Uriel Shkolnik (Lior Ashkenazi) is a 40- something Talmudic scholar whose research has earned adulation while his 60-something father’s has mostly been ignored. In this Israeli film’s very first scene, he accepts an honor with an obliviously glib speech built around a childhood anecdote about his dad’s attitude toward his own profession. The camera stays on the father, Eliezer (Shlomo Bar-Aba), for the entirety of the speech, his facial expression subtly transitioning from discomfort to disdain. Slowly, writer/director Joseph Cedar sketches in the details of father and son’s non-bond. Eliezer’s old-school approach to academia is a day-in, day-out study of primary documents, while in his eyes, his celebrity-academic son frivolously exploits history as fodder for cocktail parties. To another father, Uriel’s success might be a source of pride; to Eliezer, it’s an affront to his life’s work, an embarrassment. The stage thus set, a clerical mistake begets an academic scandal that, if allowed to come to light, would have major repercussions for both Shkolniks, their personal relationship, and the validity of their shared profession. Something between a comedy of everyday absurdity and a family tragedy pushed into the realm of the hyperreal, Footnote uses its characters’ differing relationships to authenticity as the basis for an enigmatic riff on representation. Perhaps too enigmatic: Cedar’s rigorous formal achievement is above reproach but emotionally distant. Like its elder main character, Footnote is something to respect and admire, but it remains cold and unknowable.