Waltz With Bashir [Blu-ray]
Waltz with Bashir presents an intriguing riddle: is a documentary still a documentary if it’s animated? Taking over where fact-based animations like Waking Life and Chicago 10 left off, Israel’s Ari Folman tries to wrap his head around 1982’s Lebanon War (the title refers to Lebanese leader Bashir Gemayel). Why do disturbing dreams plague his former army colleagues, while he remembers nothing? Folman meets with nine of them to find out. As they speak, animators recreate their experiences, but instead of rotoscoping or video-capture, Folman first shot his film on video and then assembled an animated version from the resulting storyboards. This graphic-novel approach suits their strange, surrealistic stories and parallels the work of Black Hole’s Charles Burns, who tends to walk on the shadowy side (as opposed to Marjane Satrapi’s more fanciful Persepolis). War may be hell, but moments of grace and beauty shine through, best exemplified by Roni Dayag’s recollection of a late-night swim away from the scene of a beachfront battle. Decades later, he still remembers the soothing peacefulness of the water. These reminiscences nudge Folman’s repressed memories back to the surface, culminating in a horrific massacre to which he bore witness. Arguably, he didn’t need to include actual footage of the deceased when stylized graphics get the point across fine. If Waltz with Bashir isn’t a documentary in the conventional sense, it doesn’t resemble most animated efforts either. What matters more is the harrowing narrative he constructs from out of the minds of these haunted men. –Kathleen C. Fennessy
User Ratings and Reviews
4 Stars Offbeat, Absorbing Animation of Israeli Lebanese War Veteran Recollections
Ari Folman, the Israeli documentary filmmaker, has now come out with one of the most provocative and original anti-war films in quite awhile. Waltz with Bashir focuses on Folman’s recollections as a young soldier in the Israeli Army during the war in Lebanon in 1982. It employs a combination of Flash, hand-drawn and computer-enhanced 3-D modeling.
The film begins with jarring images of rabid dogs running wildly through the streets of Tel Aviv. It turns out that this is a recurring nightmare that Folman’s Army veteran friend, Boaz, has been having for the past 2 ½ years. Folman himself has virtually drawn a complete blank as to his wartime memories except for one disturbing surrealistic image of he and two soldier comrades, completely naked, slowly wading through the ocean at night onto the beach in Beirut. Boaz urges Folman to try and recover his memories so he seeks out a succession of veterans who he was in combat with as well as other veterans who also had experiences in Lebanon.
First Folman visits Carmi, an old friend who was in Folman’s unit who is now a successful businessman in Holland. Carmi has no recollection of Folman’s dream about wading onto the beach but recalls how when his unit first arrived in Lebanon all their training went out the window due to fear and they were firing their weapons continuously and indiscriminately when first entering enemy territory. This lack of discipline results in the Carmi’s unit firing on a Mercedes that pops up out of nowhere, resulting in the death of a family inside the vehicle. On his way back to the airport to return to Israel, Folman begins to recover some of his repressed memories.
The middle of Waltz with Bashir deals with further interviews with other Lebanon war veterans as well as with psychiatrist who is an expert on post-traumatic stress disorder. The stories from these interviews are fascinating: one soldier is left on the beach after his tank is hit by RPG fire; after the other tanks retreat he hides from the PLO until nightfall and then swims in the ocean for miles and is luckily found by his own unit, miles from where they left him. Ironically, the soldier feels guilt that his fellow soldiers didn’t make it and is also shunned by the surviving members of his unit who convey the unspoken message that he deserted his fallen comrades.
Other disturbing stories emerge from Folman’s interviews and recollections. A 10 year old Palestinian fires a hand-held missile launcher and blows up a tank; he in turn is blown away by an advancing group of Israeli soldiers in a grove of trees. An Israeli officer spends his down-time fast-forwarding a German porn tape inside a captured villa. And as a group of soldiers are pinned down as they’re being fired upon from skyscrapers at the beach front in Beirut, a soldier does his “Waltz with Bashir” as he wheels round and round, firing his machine gun up at snipers, managing to avoid being hit (Posters of Bashir, the soon-to-be assassinated Christian Prime Minister, appear everywhere in Beirut and are seen in the background as the soldier fires wildly at the snipers).
Waltz with Bashir culminates in an examination of the infamous massacre of approximately 3,000 Palestinians by Christian Phalangist militiamen in the refugees camps of Sabra and Shatila. One thing is clear: the Israelis were not directly responsible for participating in the massacre although many people in the Muslim world still believe that the Israelis were direct participants. One of the film’s weaknesses is the failure to point out that the Palestinians were not the ONLY victims of the Lebanon war and that massacres were committed by the PLO against Christians prior to massacres in the refugee camps.
Nonetheless, an Israeli commission found the Army (under the head of Ariel Sharon) to be responsible for allowing the Phlangists into the refugee camps and acting indifferently, allowing the massacres to occur. The Commission concluded that the Army should have known that the Phalangists were out for revenge given the murder of Bashir two days before as well as the history of bad blood between the two groups.
It finally comes back to Folman; he wasn’t on the front lines right next to the camps but was stationed on a rooftop where flares were continually being shot up, allowing the Phalangists to commit their horrific deeds while the sky was lit up during nighttime. Folman obviously feels a great deal of remorse for the Israeli soldiers’ inaction during the massacre. Some writers here feel that Folman’s viewpoint is one of a left-wing, self-hating Jew. But is it? Given the Jewish people’s own victimization during the Holocaust, one would think they should hold themselves to a higher standard; despite being continually attacked by the PLO, they still had a responsibility to minimize civilian casualties.
Waltz with Bashir employs an eclectic soundtrack including pop songs from the period of the Lebanese War which adds to the film’s verisimilitude. Coupled with the unique animation and the introspective voice-overs, Bashir points out the cost of the war in terms of human suffering as well as the deleterious psychological effects upon the surviving veterans.
Waltz with Bashir’s final shots, where the animation is dispensed with and we see the actual scenes of the aftermath of the refugee camp massacre, is the only heavy-handed moment in the film. It’s at that point we feel that the filmmaker has discarded his introspective, personal outlook and tried to make a political point. Despite the awkward ending, Waltz with Bashir is filled to the brim with jarring images that will remain with you for a long time, narrated by men who have been through hell.
5 Stars Amazing.
This is a movie I had no interest in seeing, but my son wanted to go so I took him. I’m so glad I went.
It’s certainly not a light topic by a mile. Former soliders remember their experiences of the 1982 Lebanese war long after the fact, so the story of this war is told from several different points of view.
The description I read of the movie said it was an animated Apocalypse now. I can sort of see where they were coming from with that, but for me it felt a bit more like Slaughterhouse-Five: A Novel.
The animation is unlike anything I’ve ever seen … the details never scrimped on and there was an elegance, grace and dignity to the characters as they “waltzed” through hell. The story was engrossing, and the music made a tremendous impact on the movie.
War is tragic, of course, and this tale is no exception. But it so extraordinarly well-done, it’s a can’t miss in my opinion.
5 Stars Remembering hell
The honesty with which the director confronts the criminal aspects of a war fought by his country equals or surpasses “Apocalypse Now” and “Full Metal Jacket”. A really good, honest American film about Iraq would probably look a lot like this. I wasn’t sure whether animation was the best medium for the film, but any doubts I may have had were more than compensated by the extraordinary way music was used in the film.
But be warned, it is emotionally harrowing. (The film is also a good reflection of the extreme contradictions of Israeli society. That such a critical film could be made at all - something inconceivable in any Arabic-speaking country - is already extraordinary, that it was actually made with the support of the Israeli government highlights the extent of freedom of expression in Israel, which I think puts even the US to shame. And yet they elected a government of ultra-nationalist, almost fascist, parties …)
5 Stars A New Kind of Documentary
“Waltz with Bashir”
A New Kind of Documentary
Amos Lassen
Israel’s entry in the Oscar race gives a new definition of the genre of documentary film. The idea of an animated documentary may seem to be paradoxical to some but this may be a whole new way to present an idea. Basically, the film rakes place in a bar, an old friend tells “Bashir” director, Ari Folman, about a nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. The dream comes to him every night and the two men decide that there is a connection between the dream and their connection to an army mission during the war on Lebanon in the early 80’s. Ari surprises his friend and himself when he realizes that he cannot remember anything about that period in his life. They decide to interview old friends and comrades all over the world in order to find out what really happened during that time and as Ari goes deeper into the matter and the mystery, his memory begins to return with surreal thoughts and images.
“Bashir” is a very disturbing look at war and its consequences on people and nations. It compares the atrocities of the Lebanon war to other wars as it mixes dream sequences with surrealism and real life events. The film thereby mixes reality with illusion. It is in your face and very powerful.
The event that is the center of the film is the massacre at Sabra and Shatila un which Palestinians were murdered by Christian Phalangists as revenge for the assassination of their leader, Bashir Gemayel. Although the Israelis did not participate, or perpetrate the killings, they did nothing to stop them. The animation in the film is seen over the recorded speech of actual participants in the ‘82 war.
Folman’s journey of introspection begins with his lack of memory and it seems that all he and his fellow soldiers have left is their dreams. One of the former soldiers believes that the dream he has of the vicious dogs is subconscious punishment for his killing dogs on the mission. The film follows a stream of personal anecdotes and because much of these stories are dreams, Folman chose to tell them through animation with the exception of the final scene and this is the scene that gives justification for the film. Therefore the film has a feeling that is both evocative and down-to-earth. We see war as reprehensible and ugly and as the stuff that nightmares are made of. It is not about who won the war, who was right or who made mistakes. It is about how we, as people, react to war and how it affects people who are involved in it.
Primarily “Bashir” is about the trauma of conflict, memory and its repression but it is also about the specifics of Israel’s role in the Lebanon war and about war in general as it is experienced by fighting men. It revels truth by taking the viewer back in time through the memories of people who witnessed it. It devastates as it reconstructs how and why innocent civilians were massacred because those with the power to stop what was going on did nothing. We do see that Israel is not without guilt in acts of passive genocide which goes against the Israeli response to what Hamas provokes.
From the very first frame of film the movie grabs the viewer and will not let him go even after the film is over. The movie cuts deeply by using images of youth and this brings what he says home. This is more than just a movie, it is a total experience that will probably change the views of many.
5 Stars Sure-fire Oscar winner up-ended by the industry’s “long-standing joke”
I’m compelled to write this review after watching the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Foreign Film selectors botch yet another award. David Ansen wrote in Newsweek last year about how the selection committee’s decision-making, umm, ‘process’ is the industry’s “long-standing joke.” The right films don’t even get nominated (Ansen’s article centered on the egregious omissions last year of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days and The Band’s Visit). And the ultimate winner is often the ultimate head-scratcher: faced this year with two sure-fire classics - this film and the equally worthy French offering The Class (Entre les murs) [Theatrical Release] - the committee chose instead the little-known (and almost completely unseen) Japanese nominee Departures [Theatrical Release]. With all due respect to those filmmakers, you could hear the sense of bewilderment in the hall as the dazed winners (I suspect even they were dumbfounded) made their way to the stage. I’m sure that bewilderment was mixed with murmurs from an audience of insiders - something along the lines of “unbelievable, they’ve blown it again.”
A shame because this film is among the best you’ll ever see - it’s writer/director Ari Folman’s attempts to deal with his repressed memories of his role in the Sabra and Shatila camp massacres during the 1982 Lebanon War. Folman’s innovative use of animation allows him to re-stage the memories of his fellow soldiers. At the film’s end, Folman’s role (or at least his proximity to the events) is revealed and animation segues into real-life footage of what transpired in the camps.
The Golden Globe committee - with a far more firmer grasp on common sense than the Academy - handed ‘Waltz’ its award for the best foreign language film of 2008.
Ansen’s article from last year reveals the Academy’s “attempt to reform a misbegotten system,” and concludes that “Mark Johnson, chairman of the committee, has vowed further reforms. History suggests it’s going to be an uphill battle.”
Keep working at it, Mr. Johnson. This thing is still broken.
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