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Waltz With Bashir
(2008)
Vals Im Bashir
 
Let me start by saying that I knew practically nothing about the Israeli-Lebanese war of the early 1980's prior to watching this animated documentary. At roughly six or maybe seven years younger than writer/director Ari Folman when he joined the Israeli army, I was still playing football with my friends, learning to smoke and watching Saturday morning television in my comfortable, safe, middle-class home, owned by my university-educated engineer of a father.
Let me also say that I believe Folman decided to make this documentary an animated feature for a number of reasons. Firstly, as the story is in animated form, this history lesson could easily be mistaken for entertainment. Not many would sit comfortably through this picture, awe-struck by its dark, hollow beauty had the film been made with real actors. Secondly, this would probably have been impossible to do, even if he wanted to, given some of the sequences that Folman wants to show us.
This largely biographical piece tells us mostly one side (Israeli) of the events that culminated with the massacre of over eight hundred civilians in two refugee camps by 150 Phalangist fighters. As you can guess, the idea for filling the screen with animation suddenly becomes entirely sensible. This is not fun. At all.
Ari Folman's story does not begin here, however. We first meet him twenty years later, when sitting in a bar with a friend who states that he keeps having the same dream of a pack of 26 rabid, hungry dogs that have every intention of catching him. He puts this dream down to the 26 individual dogs he killed in the same war, twenty years previously. The dogs had to be killed as they were an early warning for terrorists that his unit had been told to capture. He knew he couldn't kill a man, so they made him kill the dogs instead. He questions Ari about his memories of the war, and it is at this point that Ari realises the memories he has of his part in the war are practically non-existent. We can only assume that this man has an appalling memory, but through interviews with other members of his army unit, we start to understand the real reasons for his memory loss.
We are taken on an eye-opening journey of a young Israeli soldier's life. Folman regularly references Beirut throughout the film and before his own personal journey reaches this final, dawning realisation, you can predict that this is where the story will find its eventual conclusion, even if not familiar with the content beforehand. This would normally be a criticism when aimed at a fictional tale, but here, in the role of partisan voyeur to what is happening, you may feel the need to watch events transpire through cracks in your fingers with your hands over your face, waiting breathlessly for the worst to happen.
Folman wallows in introspection throughout and you can understand his need to uncover those memories that have been lost, despite the fact that he knows perfectly well that he may find out things about himself that he would rather not. Things that may make him question the type of person he was, or maybe even still is. The story itself is an apparently honourable one, if ultimately selfish. To recognise his own self as he really is required effort, but this effort, to these eyes at least, is expended not to admit any wrongdoing on his part, but to merely fill in those gaps that are missing for him. Compound these actions by making a film about it, and you start to think that Folman might just be trying to supplicate himself. What we have presented before us here is not a story of attempted genocide and the grisly unnecessary deaths of eight hundred men, women and children, but one man finally admitting his errors of judgement and hoping people will forgive him for it. So what at first sight may seem altruistic to some, may actually be the complete opposite. Like any kind of art, it is in the eye of the beholder that a message is truly found. Bearing that in mind, I would ask some of the surviving refugees that returned home to find their fathers, sons, mothers, sisters and daughters piled chest high in alleyways if they think Folman has done the right thing by making this film at all. This is redemption for one and what appears to be an ugly reminder of loss for everybody else involved. Suddenly, the film loses some of it's worth.
Nonetheless, this film is undeniably thought-provoking, beautifully rendered and superbly paced. Taking the film purely as a piece of entertainment media, it is indeed up there with the best animated movies made so far, but my own personal feelings that the film is unilateral and unfairly biased stop me from praising it higher.
-Steve Leadbetter
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Director:
Ari Folman
Writer: Ari Folman
Starring: Ari Folman, Ron Ben-Yishai, Ronny Dayag, Dror Harazi, Yehezkel Lazarov, Mickey Leon, Ori Sivan, Zahava Solomon
Distributor: Sony Pictures Classics
Runtime: 90
min
Rating: R
Release Date: December 25, 2008
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