Waltz With Bashir

A few years ago, Israeli film producer Ari Folman sat down with a friend for a drink. His friend told him about a dream he had about his service in the First Lebanon War, in 1982. Folman realized then that he barely remembered a thing about being an Israeli soldier in the war, barring one flashback of emerging naked from the sea with several other troops in his unit, watching flares light up the Beirut sky the night of the Sabra and Shatilla massacre.

Jarred by his inability to recall his part in the war, Folman saw a therapist and tracked down people who served with him and who reported on the war to jog his memory. He wound up piecing together his role there using other people's recollections.

Waltz With Bashir is an animated documentary about Folman's quest to remember. All the interviews have been converted into animations, and the medium lends itself to the sudden snatches of scenes that he calls up as he rides in cabs, or speaks with friends, or smells patchouli perfume. Here's a trailer:



I found it for the most part a treasure. The animation is rich with detail. In one scene, the young Folman is wandering the destroyed Beirut airport, and the frame shows him passing outdated ads for flights to the United States. Before they are sent to battle, Folman and his friends lounge on the Lebanese shore, then bomb lines of palm trees to the soundtrack of the Hebrew song, "Today I bombed Sidon," a very Israeli take on Apocalypse Now. When one of his army buddies describes the feeling of invincibility he got from driving a tank through the alleyways of Beirut, the scene shows a tank rolling over cars, with the angle of the frame tilting each time the wheels crunch another vehicle. The faces are drawn with such accuracy that I could pick out the expressions, the wrinkles around the mouth and the furrows of the brow, that made the characters uniquely Israeli.

The plot was also a gradual dawn of responsibility as Folman gets closer and closer to the night of Sabra and Shatilla, which was a massacre that Israeli-trained Christian Lebanese Phalangist militiamen executed against Palestinian refugees, while Israel watched and did not intervene until somewhere between 700 and 3500 (the numbers are unclear) people were killed.

The way Folman unwinds his memory, the audience learns with him, in Hebrew, about an awful atrocity committed with Israel's knowledge and by soldiers who had been trained by the IDF. He eventually realizes that on the night of the massacre, he was not in the sea with his fellow soldiers; he was shooting flares into the sky from a tall building nearby to illuminate the refugee camp for the Phalangists. I felt gripped and disgusted, but not attacked. And I was also proud that an Israeli former soldier was able to tell the tale of his service, come to grips with his participation, and work so creatively and beautifully to make a world-class film that has already been received with high accolades in Cannes.

It also was especially exciting for me to see how journalists covered the Lebanon War, because my father was the BBC's news man in Beirut at that time. Watching an animated Israeli reporter walk the streets brought to life some of my father's stories of dodging the craters left by shells in the roads, or deciding when to scuttle across a street when it was the site of a gun battle.

One criticism - the film ends in a gory montage of real news footage of the aftermath of the massacre. After seeing the animated version, I felt I was being squeezed dry. It was as if Folman, by the time the film was finished, had still not processed the experience of being in the war and wanted to make sure we understood how bad it was. He said in an interview that he put the footage there to break the effect of the cartoon and to make sure it was seen as more than just a cool film with nice animation. Yet, perhaps if he had dwelled on the war for another few months or a year, he could have finished the film with some reflections on how it is to realize that he contributed to a brutal butchering, and what he has taken from that knowledge.