Waltz With Bashir

Monday 2nd February, start time 20:00, Reel Cinema, Andover 

Release: 2008, 90 mins (cert 18)

Precis will be published here soon.

Official website here.

Review in The Guardian here.

Review in The Sunday Times here.

Review in The Daily Telegraph here.

IMDB page here.

Reviews & Comments Received After The Presentation

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 WALTZ WITH BASHIR

[SPOILER ALERT!!]

Before seeing even a single frame of Waltz With Bashir, I decided I wouldn’t like it. I’d read plenty of reviews, some glowing and some not. The over-riding impression I formed was that I’d find this film too heavily skewed towards the Israeli point of view. Not altogether cynically, I began to wonder if it has been lauded so heavily because there are more Semites than Hamites in Hollywood. I’d also read that the film is “extraordinarily and painfully timely”. There seems to be a growing tendency of history to be rewritten through the silver screen, and I further wondered if that didn’t make Bashir a dangerous film, released at an unfortunate time.
  
But if political bias were a bar to good story-telling, we’d have precious few Westerns and almost no war films. So I went out into the snows to see a film I was going to grumble about. Now, I think that the bias was on the part of the reviewers. True, the tale is one-sided, but only insofar as it’s by a man writing about what he knows. And I felt slightly uncomfortable with references to Auschwitz that were unclear if they were for comparison or for some nebulous justification. To carp at this, though, with no real knowledge of the story-teller’s culture wouldn’t be fair.

This is a powerful film. It’s an animated documentary that is as much about the traumas experienced by wartime soldiers everywhere as it is about the Israel-Lebanon war. It’s as much about the culpability of the side you’re fighting for as it is about the reasons for that fighting. Indeed, why Israel went into Lebanon is not explained; we are not told why the enemy is the baddie.

Waltz With Bashir tells us of director Ari Folman’s almost complete lack of memories of a period in his late teens which is revealed to be so traumatic that he has subconsciously blocked out the details.

The film opens with a pack of baying, slathering dogs on the hunt in an ordinary town, stopping only when they get to the house of Boaz, one of Folman’s friends. Their eyes are orange, as is the sky. It’s a recurring dream, and it relates to Boaz’s wartime experiences. Over a beer, the two men discuss their memories of the time. Ari Folman is disturbed to realise that his own recollections are either scant or non-existent. He sets out to talk it through with his former colleagues, trying to fill in the blanks.

Memories coaxed through interviews form the staple of the film. One man remembers being seasick and falling asleep through anxiety, dreaming of rescue from a burning boat by a giant, naked woman. Another tells of a night-long swim to safety. A third used the perfume of patchouli oil to help his fellow soldiers identify him in any battlefield confusion.
  
The colour orange is repeated time and again, particularly when scenes are lit by flares. An Israeli tank forces its way through narrow streets, crushing cars and damaging buildings. Teen soldiers fire guns without knowing if there’s anyone to aim at. A boy fires rocket grenades at an Israeli unit; a family in the wrong place at the wrong time is slaughtered as their Mercedes is perforated with hundreds of bullets. Naked conscripts wade out of an orange sea. Some of these memories are real. Some are not.

It’s grim, but not entirely relentless. There are breathing spaces for the audience when Ari goes home on leave, for example, or as one soldier remembers having to fast-forward a German porn video for his commanding officer (there’s even a listed credit to Ron Jeremy). 
  
But the film does advance. It advances to the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila. Ari realises that he must have been there at the time. His memory loss is a direct consequence of his experience. It is repression of guilt.

This is the point. The Israeli army stood by as Christian Phalangists massacred hundreds, perhaps thousands, of men, women and children. Ari and his companions may not have pulled the triggers, but neither did they try to stop the killing. On the contrary, they formed a defensive ring and were even flaring up the night sky to give the Phalangists more light.
  
A TV war correspondent tells us that when he phoned Ariel Sharon to report that a massacre was going on, Sharon did no more than thank him  “for bringing it to my attention” and went back to bed. The following morning, the shooting is halted by a single officer. Presumably, the order he gave could have been given much earlier. Did the reporter tell us this in order to amplify his own sense of importance? How he stopped it? Or because we needed to understand the role of the Israeli defence Ministry? We are not told. I’m not sure that we care. We already know that the slaughter was inexcusable. And still is.

There was another reason why I thought I might not like this film: the stills I’d seen appeared sketchy and from a style of animation that irritates me. I did not want to sit through an hour an a half of Tintin Goes To Beirut.
  
I needn’t have worried. The animation is brilliant and mesmeric. Colours are intense and sharp and the style changes from background to characters. There’s a fabulous mix of digitised film, flatter two-dimensional close-ups, and simplified, almost cartoony figures, moving slowly and mechanically as if still half-asleep. It’s as real as it is surreal; sound and vision are perfectly matched to the story. Far from trivialising the subject, the animation of Waltz With Bashir grips us in a way that yet another videotaped talking heads and location footage documentary wouldn’t have done. And when the film unexpectedly cuts to real photography right at the end, we are stunned. There’s nowhere else to go but fade to black.

And we, the audience, left the theatre in silence. Ari Folman did that to us. I’m sure he meant to.

Hans van Well

[Reviewer’s opinions are not necessarily those of the Film Club]