Waltz With Bashir

Rating:	★★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Animation

It's taken me a week or two to form these words in my head, I think because of this film's subject - it's about events which, via TV news, were part of my childhood 'programming'.

I was five years old in 1982. My father, an ardent socialist who worked in a desk job in London local government, was a news-junkie, as I appear to have become in recent years. Like father like son. Point is - as much as Godzilla, Coyote & Roadrunner and Dr.Who, I remember certain vivid images from the TV during my childhood - Yasser Arafat and the PLO (who for many years I confused with 'P&O', an English Channel Ferry company); Soviet tanks rolling into Afghanistan; IRA bombs on British mainland and Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams' voice dubbed by an actor on BBC; Arthur Scargill, picket lines and miners' strikes; and of course the Falklands war, and its relevance to England's World Cup game against Argentina at Mexico '86 when Diego Maradona scored 'The Hand of God' goal. The Falklands, not so much... back in those days, I don't think 'embedded' journalists were as common, and we didn't have 24 hour news direct from the warzone to the same extent that we do today. I don't have images in my early memory of that, like I do of British journalist Kate Adie in Beirut, who my father always joked was unpopular in the office so she got sent to the most dangerous locations. Beirut I've been aware of since day one. The actual details of Israel and her neighbours, I only came to understand much more recently... for years, I was perplexed as to the relationship between Judaism the religion and Israelis as a 'race'. I still don't believe the layperson can properly understand this without some reading and actively attempting to find out for his or her-self.

It was in that light that this interested me. My leftiness and tendency to be appalled by bullies, genocide and war-crimes, has often found me allied with the Palestinian and Lebanese cause, careful to recognise that Hamas and Hizbollah are no saints either, yet I remain fundamentally opposed to organised religion, particularly the patriarchal Abrahamic ones. You either believe in that or you don't, and I don't. I think they're far more trouble than they're worth. So... that's me, and I was of course not able to watch, much less review this film without a degree of subjectivity. So I did a little background reading -

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Waltz with Bashir (Hebrew: ואלס עם באשיר‎ - Vals Im Bashir) is a 2008 Israeli animated documentary film written and directed by Ari Folman. It depicts Folman in search of his lost memories from the 1982 Lebanon War.[2][3][4]

This film and $9.99, also released in 2008, are the first Israeli animated feature-length films released in movie theaters since Alina and Yoram Gross's Ba'al Hahalomot (1962). Waltz with Bashir premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival where it entered the competition for the Palme d'Or, and since then has won and been nominated for many additional important awards while receiving wide acclaim from critics. It won a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film, an NSFC Award for Best Film, a César Award for Best Foreign Film and an IDA Award for Feature Documentary, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, a BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language and an Annie Award for Best Animated Feature.

Plot Summary

In 1982, Ari Folman was a 19-year-old infantry soldier in the Israel Defense Forces. In 2006, he meets with a friend from his army service period, who tells him of the nightmares connected to his experiences from the Lebanon War. Folman is surprised to find that he does not remember a thing from that period. Later that night he has a vision from the night of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the reality of which he is unable to tell. In his memory, he and his soldier friends are bathing at night by the seaside in Beirut under the light of flares descending over the city. Folman rushes off to meet another friend from his army service, who advises him to discuss it with other people who were in Beirut at the same time in order to understand what happened there and to relive his own memory. Folman converses with friends, a psychologist and the reporter Ron Ben-Yishai who was in Beirut at the time.

The film ends with animation transitioning to actual footage of the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

The film takes its title from a scene in which Shmuel Frenkel, one of the interviewees and the commander of Folman's infantry unit at the time of the film's events, grabs a light machine gun and "dances an insane waltz" (to the tune of Chopin's Waltz in C Sharp) amid heavy enemy fire on a Beirut street festooned with huge posters of Bashir Gemayel.

Bachir Gemayel (10 November 1947 – 14 September 1982) (first name also spelled Bashir and surname also spelled al-Jumayyil El Gemaiel, Joomayyeel) (بشير الجميّل) was a Lebanese politician, militia commander, and president-elect. He was a senior member of the Phalange party and the commander of the Lebanese Forces militia amid the first several years of the Lebanese Civil War (1975-90). He was elected president on August 23, 1982 while the country was torn by civil war and occupied by both Israel and Syria. He was assassinated on September 14, 1982, along with 26 others, when a bomb exploded in the Beirut headquarters of the Phalange. The bomb was planted by Habib Tanious Shartouni.[1] The FBI blamed the Syrian Social Nationalist Party.[2]

Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. Defense Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, met with Bachir months earlier, telling him that the Israeli Defense Force were planning an invasion to uproot the PLO threat to Israel and to move them out of Lebanon. [5] While Bachir did not control Israel’s actions in Lebanon, the support they gave the Lebanese Forces, militarily and politically, angered many Lebanese Muslims.

The PLO was rooted out of Lebanon in August of 1982. By now, Bachir had announced his candidacy for president. He was backed by the United States, who sent peacekeeping troops to oversee the withdrawal of the PLO from Lebanon. Bachir had requested that they stay longer to keep Lebanon stable until he could reunite it, but his request was denied. On August 23, 1982, being the only one to declare his bid, Bachir was elected president.

On 1 September 1982, two weeks before his assassination and only one week after his election, Bachir met the Israeli Prime minister Menachem Begin in Nahariya. Begin demanded that Bachir sign a peace treaty with Israel as soon as he took office in return of Israel's earlier support of Lebanese Forces. Begin was reportedly angry at Bachir for his public denial of Israel's support. Bachir refused the immediate peace arguing that time is needed to reach consensus with Lebanese Muslim communities and Arab nations. Bachir was quoted telling David Kimche, the director general of the Israeli Foreign Ministry, few days earlier, “Please tell your people to be patient. I am committed to make peace with Israel, and I shall do it. But I need time-nine months, maximum one year. I need to mend my fences with the Arab countries, especially with Saudi Arabia, so that Lebanon can once again play its central role in the economy of the Middle East.”[6][7]

"Phalange" and "Phalangist" redirect here. For the Spanish party, see Falange. For the bones of the hand and foot, see Phalanx bones. For the ancient infantry, see Phalangite.

The Lebanese Social Democratic Party — better known in English as the Phalange — is a right-wing Lebanese political party. Although it is officially secular, it is mainly supported by Maronite Christians. The party played a major role in the Lebanese War (1975-90). In decline in the late 1980s and 1990s, the party slowly re-emerged since the early 2000s. It is now part of the parliamentary majority, the March 14 Alliance, opposed to the alliance led by Hezbollah and the Free Patriotic Movement.

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I've only given this Golden-Globe winning, Oscar nominated animation three of a possible five stars. Those here who know me and know this film might find that surprising. I simply have to admit it didn't hold my attention. I watched it in two sittings, inspired to finish viewing after a conversation about it with my new housemate, who teaches Media at the local college. His verdict is, I think, the secret of the film's success.

"You see the live footage at the end..." he asked, and I admitted I hadn't managed to watch it throughout, finding it almost repulsively biased in favour of Israel.

"...could you watch an hour and a half of that?"

Irony is, I probably would... but I know what he meant. My in-house video-editing teacher and animation enthusiast had hit the nail right on the head. Director Ari Folman is a former serviceman in the Israeli army, and a veteran of the Lebanese invasion of 1982. He also the central character - it concerns his loss of memory about the events of the war. Now, it strikes me as a convenient vehicle to carry the story along that he had amnesia, and he could just as easily have made it all up for the sake of his art... but it's convincing enough. It's a true story.

I went back to it and watched the rest. True enough, as animation, the images are in some way diluted and the viewer is able to endure the history lesson (which Folman makes no attempt to pretend isn't told from an Israeli perspective (his own), it's not a 'political' film, but a personal one - see video below) without being put off by the shocking images. It's a predictable narrative though, because we know what happened, so we know the end.

I'm not keen on films that try to re-write history and distort events, subtlety or not. And as a cartoon, this will reach a younger audience, as he also says in the video below. This IS a political film, whether Folman likes it or not, and this aspect of it really puts me off. A generation of young people will grow up with this tale as their chief understanding of what happened in Lebanon in 1982. It just doesn't dig deep enough.

The artwork is striking, comic-book-esque. Memorable enough, but not the best I've ever seen. 'A Scanner Darkly' and 'Plague Dogs' were more interesting to the eye. But it received widespread acclaim, so who cares what I think?

If you're inclined to download rather than seek out the hard-copy, you'll miss out on the interview with Folman in the special features. I found that very helpful in understanding it's purpose. Here's a similar interview:




And for those more curious about the animation and artwork itself, which I haven't said so much about because I don't really know enough to evaluate it, there is an image gallery here:

http://waltzwithbashir.com/home.html


6 out of 10.