At the Movies: Waltz With Bashir
Here’s a first for this reviewer: an animated and sub-titled Israeli film.
It would be a shame if you allowed any of those things to put you off Waltz With Bashir, though, because it’s a revelation in many ways.
Each night, a former Israeli soldier is tormented by a dream involving 26 savage dogs. He seeks out one of his old army buddies, a film-maker, and asks what he thinks the dream might mean. The question stirs the film-maker’s own memories and so the piece unfolds. Seeking to reconstruct the missing parts of his war experience, the film-maker visits former comrades, a war correspondent and some counsellors and interrogates them.
The film’s style is part-documentary, part-memoir, part-graphic novel, part-cartoon and part-video game.
The fact that the war in question is the war in Lebanon in the 1980s is, in some ways, incidental. Questions of motivation, justice and injustice, the randomness of war and the idiocy of pitting two sides’ nearly invisible 19-year-olds against each other in a remote political struggle are all evoked by the film. We’re invited to think about memory (and memories) too, and the seemingly unstoppable ability of history to repeat itself when revenge and blind hatred are allowed to be a major motivation for the behaviour of nations, factions and individuals.
Animation is a particularly unreal version of the unreality that film deals in. Here, animation seems the perfect medium for the dream-driven action that unfolds. It offers a layered view that is much more obvious than the layering, framing, and focussing that directors of “real” films indulge in. This obviousness never detracts from the film’s power, however: it enhances it by playing with shots, angles, light, and shadows. Fans of animation are sure to be impressed by the finer details, and the sound-track is great, even with the songs’ lyrics in subtitles.
It’s somehow encouraging that a nation like Israel, where the hawks seems to outnumber the doves, can make a film like Waltz With Bashir, with its unflinching depiction of the horrors of war.
Waltz With Bashir won an Oscar and a Golden Globe for best foreign language film. It’s both gripping and chilling, and, despite the fact that it’s animated, it’s not light or escapist in any way. Give it a shot.
Neil Wilson
WALTZ WITH BASHIR (R16) Next screening at the Village Theatre, Wednesday 13 May at 7.30pm.
