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Waltz With Bashir

War Dance

It would be glibly inappropriate to say that the American release of Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir around the middle of December and its selection as Best Film by the National Society of Film Critics were opportunely timed. But because Folman’s singular and powerful film is focused, in its own intensely personal fashion, on the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the Jewish state’s devastating military incursion into the Gaza strip within days of the first two events was a striking coincidence. (The film is also up for the Foreign Language Film Oscar.)

Waltz With Bashir deals with the Israeli experience of the 1982 war, but it’s both larger and smaller than a historical narrative. It resists categorical capture. Essentially an animated documentary—until its last shocking moments when it shifts to old news film footage—Waltz With Bashir deftly and creatively disregards generic conventions. It very soon becomes a kind of cinematic oral history with phantasmagoric elements.

Folman’s conceptual starting point is his own troubling historical amnesia. He can’t remember most of his youthful service in the Israeli Defense Forces during the ’82 war. His forgetting is unpleasantly underlined for him by a friend, Boaz, who relates a recurrent nightmare to Folman: A pack of gleaming-eyed, hell-sent dogs lope through Tel Aviv streets at night to stop beneath the apartment window Boaz stands behind, growling and staring menacingly up at him.

Boaz knows these frightening dreams come from one particular night in ’82 when his army unit approached a Lebanese village containing Palestinian fighters and civilians. Folman is sympathetic but doubts he can help. “I’m only a filmmaker,” he tells his friend, but Boaz suggest that “films can be therapeutic.” Whether that’s true on either an individual or societal level isn’t a question that the film directly engages, but Folman is motivated to find the memories of war that he can’t access, and this film is ostensibly the result.

He has his own disturbing dream, one in which he and other naked young soldiers, some carrying Uzis, wade ashore onto a beach at the edge of war-ravaged Beirut. Unlike Boaz, Folman can’t interpret his dream, and, at the suggestion of a psychiatrist, he seeks out other old friends who also took part in the invasion. They recount experiences that, whether dreamed or recollected, are nightmarish and surreal.

The film’s depiction of war is often subjective, and almost unrelievedly disorienting, a harrowing, sometimes deadly dreamscape. The men’s stories assist Folman toward a retrieval of his own repressed recollections. He and his film move toward crucial events: the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, a leader of the right-wing Christian paramilitary forces with which the Israelis made common cause, and the massacre of Palestinian refugees by Gemayel’s enraged followers as the Israeli army stood by, refusing to intervene until hundreds had been slaughtered.

Folman has largely assembled this personal reconstruction of that wartime history from the excerpted interviews with these former reluctant warriors. (For personal reasons, two of them didn’t want their voices on the soundtrack and their words are spoken by actors.) The conversations and the individual narratives sometimes sound like fictional dialogue, and it can be easy to forget that the men are relating actual experiences, at least as they remember them.

Waltz With Bashir’s haunting and hallucinatory quality can pull you in even as you try to remain distanced from it. The animation, supervised by Yoni Goodman, isn’t wildly stylized. It modestly but arrestingly combines sleekly limned individual characters with more complex, almost Photo Realist settings. The limited palette of color seems to pull the artwork together, increasing the film’s distinctive visual effectiveness.

Waltz With Bashir is both about war’s atrocities and its individual traumas, their immediate impacts, and the ones that can linger poisonously for decades.



Watch the movie trailer for Waltz With Bashir


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