A FILM REVIEW
WALTZ WITH BASHIR
by Malik Isasis
The Academy Awards nominations were announced January 22, 2009, and Waltz with Bashir (Israel) was one of the films nominated for Best Foreign Film, deservedly so. But missing from the Best Foreign film category were Let the Right One In (Sweden), The Edge of Heaven (Germany) and Under the Bombs (Lebanon). Of course the nominating process makes no sense because it’s nonsensical, kind of like the college football rankings. For instance, how can Slumdog Millionaire be nominated for best picture, best director and not have any of the cast nominated for an award?
Waltz with Bashir is from Israel. It is a hybrid of a film; it is a documentary that is animated, a zoetropic memoir of one Israeli soldier’s experience during the Lebanon war of 1982. Ari Foreman, the writer and director chose animation to tell his story so to capture the dreamscapes, or nightmares that haunted him and other veterans of the war. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, beautifully animated sequences almost obscures the dark nature of the subject matter, making it palatable for a broader audience.
The film opens with a pack of feral dogs running the streets of Beirut, apparently during Lebanon’s civil war many dogs were abandoned, so it was quite common to see a band of wild dogs running the streets feasting on the charred remains of the dead. You ever wonder why fire departments no longer take their Dalmatians or dogs on the fire trucks? Well, after the dogs were found to be eating the burnt remains of fire victims thus the practice of bringing dogs along was stopped.
For twenty years, one of the veterans in the film kept having a dream where the pack of dogs would amass at his window and wait for him so to eat him. They numbered 26. When the protagonists, Ron Ben-Yishai asked how he knew it was 26 and not 30, the veteran answered that he knew the exact number because it was the exact number of dogs he’d shot during the war. The dogs at night would give away their presence and he would have to shoot them.
There was some unexpected eroticism in the film. One veteran dreamt of being taken away by a huge naked woman who carried him like a baby, and swam off with him, backstroking as he lay calmly in between he legs and breast. The protagonist’s own reoccurring dream is of naked Israeli soldiers in the sea near the beach, hypnotized by flares that lit up the night.
What is striking in the story is a veteran saying that they were all 19 and 18 year old kids who had no idea why or who they were fighting. In fact, the film perfectly illustrates these young men firing blindly into cars, bushes—anything that moved, out of fear. It also explains how the Palestinian massacres could have happened. The film delves into the root cause of the protagonist's reoccurring dream and memory loss of his time in Lebanon: witnessing the massacring of thousands of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Phalangist, a Christian militia group at the time (now a political party). The Lebanese civil war was a complicated war of factions; however, the Israeli army which occupied Lebanon stood by as thousands of Palestinians were killed.
The most powerful sequence in the film is when the grieving wives, mothers and sisters numbering in the hundreds, marched in grief. The animation melts into actual footage of the massacre in which dead bodies of men, women and children lie in waste. There is no music, no sound, just images of death and destruction brought on by the nonsense of war. Waltz with Bashir is about as close as the American media will get to balancing the coverage of the ongoing chaos of the Middle East, and it took an Israeli filmmaker, and veteran to do it.
Grade: A
WALTZ WITH BASHIR
by Malik Isasis
The Academy Awards nominations were announced January 22, 2009, and Waltz with Bashir (Israel) was one of the films nominated for Best Foreign Film, deservedly so. But missing from the Best Foreign film category were Let the Right One In (Sweden), The Edge of Heaven (Germany) and Under the Bombs (Lebanon). Of course the nominating process makes no sense because it’s nonsensical, kind of like the college football rankings. For instance, how can Slumdog Millionaire be nominated for best picture, best director and not have any of the cast nominated for an award?
Waltz with Bashir is from Israel. It is a hybrid of a film; it is a documentary that is animated, a zoetropic memoir of one Israeli soldier’s experience during the Lebanon war of 1982. Ari Foreman, the writer and director chose animation to tell his story so to capture the dreamscapes, or nightmares that haunted him and other veterans of the war. Like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, beautifully animated sequences almost obscures the dark nature of the subject matter, making it palatable for a broader audience.
The film opens with a pack of feral dogs running the streets of Beirut, apparently during Lebanon’s civil war many dogs were abandoned, so it was quite common to see a band of wild dogs running the streets feasting on the charred remains of the dead. You ever wonder why fire departments no longer take their Dalmatians or dogs on the fire trucks? Well, after the dogs were found to be eating the burnt remains of fire victims thus the practice of bringing dogs along was stopped.
For twenty years, one of the veterans in the film kept having a dream where the pack of dogs would amass at his window and wait for him so to eat him. They numbered 26. When the protagonists, Ron Ben-Yishai asked how he knew it was 26 and not 30, the veteran answered that he knew the exact number because it was the exact number of dogs he’d shot during the war. The dogs at night would give away their presence and he would have to shoot them.
There was some unexpected eroticism in the film. One veteran dreamt of being taken away by a huge naked woman who carried him like a baby, and swam off with him, backstroking as he lay calmly in between he legs and breast. The protagonist’s own reoccurring dream is of naked Israeli soldiers in the sea near the beach, hypnotized by flares that lit up the night.
What is striking in the story is a veteran saying that they were all 19 and 18 year old kids who had no idea why or who they were fighting. In fact, the film perfectly illustrates these young men firing blindly into cars, bushes—anything that moved, out of fear. It also explains how the Palestinian massacres could have happened. The film delves into the root cause of the protagonist's reoccurring dream and memory loss of his time in Lebanon: witnessing the massacring of thousands of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Phalangist, a Christian militia group at the time (now a political party). The Lebanese civil war was a complicated war of factions; however, the Israeli army which occupied Lebanon stood by as thousands of Palestinians were killed.
The most powerful sequence in the film is when the grieving wives, mothers and sisters numbering in the hundreds, marched in grief. The animation melts into actual footage of the massacre in which dead bodies of men, women and children lie in waste. There is no music, no sound, just images of death and destruction brought on by the nonsense of war. Waltz with Bashir is about as close as the American media will get to balancing the coverage of the ongoing chaos of the Middle East, and it took an Israeli filmmaker, and veteran to do it.
Grade: A
posted by Malik Isasis at
10:43 AM
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