Film: Waltz With Bashir
Release date: 30th March 2009
Certificate: 18
Running time: 87 mins
Director: Ari Folman
Starring: Ron Ben-Yishai, Ronny Dayag, Ari Folman, Shmuel Frenkel, Dror Harazi
Genre: Animation
Studio: Artificial Eye
Format: DVD
Country: Israel/France/Germany/USA/Finland/Switzerland/Belgium/Australia
Waltz With Bashir is Ari Folman’s 2008 adult animation based on the political corruption of Lebanon. Distressing chronicles of the 1982 war in Beirut are magnified by the fact that the film is based on the director’s own experiences - the cartoon visuals serving to make the facts more digestible.
The film opens to a gang of fearless dogs, vicious and steadily raging through a city dowsed in morosely animated colours of grey and yellow. This is the troubled dream of army war veteran Boaz Rein-Biskila; a dream which took twenty years to form itself following the horrific events of the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.
Protagonist Ari Folman discusses the dream with its owner, only to suddenly realise that any memories of the event that he also witnessed are absent from his mind. He is not suffering from amnesia, he is not sick; he has simply unveiled an area of grey cloud within his brain. And so the film’s concept begins, following Folman as he goes on to converse with characters with which he had shared his war experiences, attempting to piece together this broken mental jigsaw…
Folman’s interviewees are a mismatched assortment of middle-aged characters, all with different experiences to share, different emotions to feel, but with a common focal point: the Lebanon massacre of 1982. We meet Carmi Cnaa’n, a cannabis-smoking falafel vendor who now lives in Holland. We meet Folman’s psychologist friend, who casts a philosophical light on this troubling lack of memory. We meet people who could just as easily be our own friends trying to solve our own problems with their barefaced storytelling of intensely personal mental excerpts.
Folman nonchalantly ponders whether he was 100, 200 or 300 yards from the massacre. He goes back into his 19-year-old self and cautiously wanders the streets of Beirut alongside punks and the scent of death. A tank of soldiers laugh and joke as they draw towards a site riddled with soldiers and guns. Their amusement is harshly slaughtered as the commander receives a bullet to the face, pushing the film’s atmosphere from cheery camaraderie down into frantic terror and the heartbreaking loyalty associated with team survival attempts. These pieces of the grand memory puzzle are slowly collected to form a frosted picture of despair and terror, relieved only occasionally by subtle moments of humour – such as the amusing reconstruction of an animated porn video on a television.
The title itself is drawn from one instance during the battle, where a soldier named Shmuel Frenkel performs an intricate dance with his machine-gun amidst a rain of enemy fire, musically accompanied by Chopin’s Waltz #6. He glides delicately beneath a poster of Bashir Gemayel, the Lebanese Phalangist leader and Israeli ally. The entire construction of this scene is fundamentally disturbing, with the audio choice and the elegance depicted in the most inappropriate of places – a combination of classical piano in conjunction with certain death is never intended to have a comforting effect.
Surprisingly, the film undeniably intends to portray the Israeli soldiers as the victims more so than the civilians - highlighted perfectly by the scene where Folman watches a crowd of screaming, faceless Palestinian women. The voices of the women are slowly drained out; leaving the shot focused on Folman’s distressed facial expression and loud, shallow breathing, as he struggles to cope with the emotional impact of the situation. Throughout the film, all Palestinians are seen only as dead or indistinct beings, merely objects alongside the constantly dynamic soldiers.
The cinematography is visually similar to the rotoscope animation techniques used by Richard Linklater in A Scanner Darkly. In actual fact, the film’s graphics are loyal to its homeland, as its aesthetic design is a method invented by Israeli ilustrator Yoni Goodman. This haunting cartoon version of reality is created using Adobe Flash cutouts, and the additional use of muted colour palettes makes for very sombre viewing.
Waltz With Bashir is a cathartic journey with an impressive collection of award wins and nominations. The monotonous Hebrew is detached from the film by the requirement for subtitles, accentuating the graphic quality and allowing the pictures to speak for themselves like subdued segments of foreign news recordings. The memories built up over the course of the film are surely too much for one person to contain. At the beginning, Folman was unsettled by his inability to remember an incident of such magnitude. At the end, he apparently regains his mind as the film suddenly cuts to genuine video footage of the war - footage that he will find impossible to forget.
Perhaps the animated nature of the film lures you into a false sense of security, for even a rabid dog or a dead child can never be as horrific as its lifelike replica. Or perhaps this is worse, as Waltz With Bashir conceals murder and distress inside beautifully directed images to the point where sadness simply becomes artful cinema instead of an actual emotion. But while it is technically just a cartoon, it is also much more than that. Waltz With Bashir is something profound; it is something that speaks with gritty wisdom, something that cries real tears. NM
