Paul Byrnes, reviewer
September 10, 2008
WALTZ WITH BASHIR is a brilliant piece of work and I never want to see it again. I'm not sure that is the reaction that Israeli writer and director Ari Folman was aiming for, but it could be.
This is a traumatic film about trauma. It is intended as a war film that will make no one want to join up. That is itself against the tradition of war films, most of which are built on the feeling that war is hell, but soldiering is glorious. Waltz With Bashir has none of that. It takes away all the conventional excitement that make young men think going to war might be fun.
The movie does not offer a side to cheer for; there are just soldiers and civilians, some of whom die. There are no scenes of heroism, no battles to enjoy (what we see are more often short, chaotic and terrifying skirmishes, many of them tragic mistakes). Instead, we enter a series of clouded visions, shaky memories and tortured dreams. This is about aftermath, putting the broken bits of memory back together.
Did I mention that it's animated? That's part of the brilliance. Folman could never afford to make this as live action, but animation makes everything possible - even documentary. That is what this is, sort of: a feature-length, animated personal diary that is also a documentary about the memories of Israeli men who fought in Lebanon in 1982, one of whom is Ari Folman.
All of the stories are about memory and forgetting, and most of them lead to the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila, on the outskirts of Beirut. Here, on September 15 and 16, 1982, Christian militiamen massacred somewhere between 700 and 3500 Palestinians, while the Israeli Defence Force allegedly looked on. That last statement is disputed, but the movie includes an interview with an Israeli soldier stationed at the gates of Shatila that night, who says they knew what was happening and tried to pass it on.
Folman also talks to the Israeli journalist Ron Ben-Yishai, who says he called the then defence minister, Ariel Sharon, that night to say he had credible reports of massacres in the camps. "Did you see it yourself?" Sharon asked him. "No," said the reporter. "OK, thanks for bringing it to my attention," he says Sharon replied, before hanging up.
Folman makes his own memory - or lack of it - the core of the film. In the first scene, he and his friend Boaz Rein-Buskila are having a drink in a bar in Israel in 2006. Their figures have been photographed and then animated, so they look real but painted in deep primary colours. Boaz wants his help to understand a disturbing dream he keeps having, about their time in Lebanon in 1982. Ari says he never thinks about the war; his memories are virtually non-existent. "But you were there, near to Sabra and Shatila," says Boaz, estimating that Ari was only about 100 metres from where the massacres took place. Folman corrects him - no closer than 200-300 metres, he says. That makes you wonder how he could both remember and forget at the same time.
In a way that's what the film is about - the difference between forgetting and repressing, between traumatic amnesia and the kind of conscious manipulative self-deception in which responsibility is avoided. Which of these is driving Ari Folman, I wondered: did he really have no memories of 1982 in Lebanon, as he says, or is that his way of getting into this story? And does that matter in a film that's a form of documentary?
I am still not sure, because this movie doesn't easily give up its secrets. That's one of its ideas - the truth is hard to get to.
Folman talks to other soldier friends about their memories His conversations are intimate, rather than journalistic. He also talks to a post-trauma specialist, who explains the tricks the mind can play, and a smart friend who tells him that memory is dynamic and alive. Folman is worried that he will discover things he does not want to know about himself. "Memory tells us where we need to go," his friend, Ori Sivan, says.
In each conversation, we see an animated version of the real person talking to Folman before the movie takes off into a recreation of the story they wish to tell. Some of these are traumatic, some astonishing, but each is an imaginative tour de force: poetic, nightmarish, searing. It's not always clear whose memories we are entering, but a sense of chaos is somehow appropriate.
Folman has said the movie is non-political. That is true, in the sense that it is abstracted. You will not get a very clear sense of the politics that led to the murder of the Lebanese president-elect, Bashir Gemayel, in a bombing in 1982. You do get a clear sense of the violence that his death unleashed. And in case we might feel that animation blunts the reality of that violence, Folman switches at the end to actuality of the camps, the horrendous footage taken just after the militiamen pulled out. In that sense, the movie is very political, especially in Israel, where it would instantly evoke memories of other camps. As I said, the movie is traumatic, but also original, demanding and rewarding.
This story was found at: http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2008/09/10/1220857629395.html
