Review: Waltz with Bashir (2008)

[Jonathan Moya]

Waltz With Bashir (Vals im Bashir)
 (2008)

A Movie Review
By
Jonathan Moya
4 Out of 5 Stars or A-

The Plot: (from IMDB.com)

One night at a bar, an old friend tells director Ari about a recurring
nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. Every night, the
same number of beasts. The two men conclude that there's a connection
to their Israeli Army mission in the first Lebanon War of the early
eighties. Ari is surprised that he can't remember a thing anymore
about that period of his life. Intrigued by this riddle, he decides to
meet and interview old friends and comrades around the world. He needs
to discover the truth about that time and about himself. As Ari delves
deeper and deeper into the mystery, his memory begins to creep up in
surreal images.

The Review:

Sometimes the greatest soul pain is in the amnesia of life.   The
moment's one ought to remember but cannot.    In Waltz with Bashir, an
animated documentary about the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and
the Sabra Shatila massacre, Ari Folman tries to recover that
experience from the ennui of war, genocide, the holocaust and the
Jewish consciousness.  Folman was a 19-year-old Israeli soldier
stationed close to the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps at the time of the
massacres.   Now forty-five, Folman can only remember the leave
times.  He seeks out others in his platoon to see if they have the
same memories.  Waltz with Bashir becomes their animated nightmare,
testimony and witness.

The memories that come back are like a pack of twenty-six snarling
marauding dogs baying under a window-- the ritual nightmare that has
haunted Boaz Buskila for thirty years.  Twenty-six was the number of
dogs he shot during the war.  Boaz gives his testimony but not his
face.  The animated Boaz is a composite done by an actor in the
original reference videos.  The same for Carmi  Cna'an, the longtime
friend of Folman  with genius potential but who turned his back on all
of it after the war to embrace Buddhism and a Dutch exile.  Their
encounter in Bashir is cold and detached, made tolerable by the reefer
they share.

The other five who share their faces and voices, recall the events
with a narrative and emotional detachment that makes them characters,
witnesses and bystanders to their own story-- something terrible that
happened to someone else.  The reality is there- as much of it as they
can absorb before the body heals the mind with the balm of
forgetfulness and memory and time bends existence into the eternal
fiction-fact compromise. Only Roni Dayag has a trauma free normality,
a future without the war shadows and ghosts.  Detached from his
squadron he survived by spending the night sitting still behind a rock
and slipping into a calm sea that drifts him back to his comrades the
next day. Dayag found peace in the surrender to that calm flow while
the others fight the tide of guilt and conscience.  They rise out of
the sea's baptism, fully armed but naked, fearful and weary, thrust
into the golden exploding city melting before their eyes.  Folman
revisits that scene two more times just as the violence and war shifts
to more savagery (the invasion) and massacre (Sabra-Shatila) making it
a prophecy that points to the entryway of Sheol.  The squadron drift
into a stasis and nothingness that allows the Sabra-Shatila evil by
the Christian Phalangists.  In a memorable scene, Israeli flares light
the way to the camps. In their head and souls, The Holocaust lives
just a small conscience step away from genocide.

The two who try to do the right thing are circumscribed, their futures
dismembered.   Dror Harazi, Folman's tank squadron commander who
aspired to be a general, did everything he could to alert his
superiors to the situation at the Shatila camp, only to earn a
premature and disgraceful discharge from the army.   His testimony is
a last cry to expose the truth. Ron Ben-Yeshai, an Israeli war
correspondent of twenty years and at least six campaigns, called
Minister of Defense Arik Sharon about the massacres.  Sharon did
nothing to stop them.   The next twenty years for Yeshai were without
promotion.   Sharon made sure of that.

The need to forget horror provides horror its opportunity.  Waltz with
Bashir shows the results of that genetic holocaust which has existed
ever since Cain murdered Abel.  It gets an A-.

The Credits:   (From Allmovie.com)

Ari Folman  - Director / Producer / Screenwriter / Cinematographer
Serge Lalou  - Producer Gerhard Meixner  - Producer Yael Nahlieli  -
Producer Roman Paul  - Producer Max Richter  - Composer (Music Score)
Nili Feller  - Editor David Polonsky  - Art Director / Illustrator
Thierry Garrel  - Co-producer Pierrette Ominetti  - Co-producer Aviv
Aldema  - Sound/Sound Designer Bridgit Folman Film Gang  - Animator
Tal Gadon  - Chief Animator Yoni Goodman  - Animation Director Roiy
Nitzan  - Visual Effects Supervisor

With:  Ari Folman  - [Voice] Ori Sivan  - [Voice] Roni Dayag  -
[Voice] Shmuel Frenkel  - [Voice] Ron Ben Yisahi  - [Voice] Dror
Harazi  - [Voice] Boaz Rein Buskila  - [Voice] Carmi Cna'an  - [Voice]
Yehezkel Lazarov  - [Voice]


Copyright 2009 by Jonathan Moya