Waltz With Bashir

Dir. Ari Folman, Israel/Germany/France, 2008, 87 mins

Review by Kevin Gill

With its striking look and vibrant soundtrack, the animated feature Waltz With Bashir possesses a ‘cool’ factor that would appear to be completely at odds with its subject matter: Israel’s role in the 1983 massacre of Palestinian refugees by Bashir Gemayel’s Phalangist militia at Sabra and Shatila in Southern Lebanon. However, after taking his audience on an expressionistic journey through his and his colleagues past experiences on the front line, debut director and former Israeli soldier Ari Folman overcomes this apparent incongruity between form and content by closing his film with live-action actual footage of the aftermath of the bloodshed. The viewer has been treated to a visual tour-de-force, no doubt, but leaves the cinema shocked and sickened, contemplating the dreadful, futile reality of war.

Aesthetically speaking, Folman’s film could not begin more differently. Instead of real people in real places making real sounds, we see a highly stylised, animated dream sequence. A ferocious pack of black dogs tears down a city street at twilight, mouths foaming and eyes ablaze, hell bent on destruction, as the soundtrack booms with a pounding, menacing bass line. The dream belongs to Ari’s friend and former comrade, which he connects to his time serving in action. This acts as a catalyst to Folman’s project: he realises his subconscious has blanked out the period he spent with the military in Lebanon, so he sets out to find out what happened to him by interviewing old friends and comrades.

That footage could easily have formed the basis of a straight ‘talking heads’ style documentary, but Folman felt, not without good reason, that this approach would have been boring, especially with no real archive material to embellish his subjects’ testimonies. Instead, the video footage acts only as a starting point, and although the end result bears comparison with the graphic style of Richard Linklater’s Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly, Folman points out that the animation does not emulate the ‘rotoscoping’ technique employed in those films. There is no painting over raw footage – what we actually see is ‘a combination of Flash animation, classic animation and 3D’.

Essentially, the interviewees’ testimonies and Ari’s own emerging memories offer free reign to the creative faculties of Art Director David Polonsky and Director of Animation Yoni Goodman. It’s a mantle they take on with flair and panache, as Waltz With Bashir serves up sequence after sequence that stir the senses with dazzling invention and attention to detail. Many scenes have a surreal, hallucinatory quality. A dazed Ari takes an imaginary tour of Beirut’s destroyed and abandoned airport, a friend recalls a fantasy in which he sails off to safety aboard a giant-sized woman and, in a recurring scene, Ari and his colleagues emerge slowly from the sea, naked but for their dog tags, bathed in the orange glow of flares falling from the night sky. However, the film does not restrict itself to depicting war as a dreamlike experience. Mood often turns on a dime in Waltz With Bashir to bring the harrowing reality of combat and conflict to the fore. In one scene we see Ari’s colleague Roni Dayg arrive on the front line with little to do but survey the derelict streets and bask in the pastoral beauty of southern Lebanon, enjoying the carefree camaraderie of his regiment. The atmosphere of youthful exhilaration then suddenly gives way to panic as his tank comes under heavy fire and we switch to his frantic point of view. Men down, he is suddenly alone, vulnerable and frightened, with little choice but to flee for the relative safety of the dark, ominous sea. Elsewhere, fear-stricken, trigger-happy Israeli troops arrive on the beach at Sidon and unload their automatic weapons on a car occupied by an innocent family, young men are shunted aboard an aircraft to be carted home in wooden boxes and Palestinian refugees line up against a wall before being systematically shot by Phalangist fighters.

A sense of anger and resentment about the profound injustice and sheer pointlessness of all this carnage slowly builds over the course of the film, though Folman is resolutely on the fence when it comes to assessing Israel’s role in the massacres at Sabra and Shatila. On a wider political level, the testimony of television journalist Ron Ben Yashi proves that the Minister of Defence at the time, Ariel Sharon, was complicit, if not instrumental in the operation. Ari and his comrades, however, claim lack of knowledge and no personal responsibility for the bloodshed. Repressed memories in this case translate merely to trauma, rather than guilt. Ari’s friend and freewheeling Freudian Ori Sivan suggests the director experienced the war from a detached, impersonal, trancelike position, as if from behind a camera. Until the final horrendous moments of this mesmerising film, that’s a neat metaphor for the viewer’s relationship with what’s on the screen.