Film: "Waltz With Bashir"

I haven't blogged here in a while, which is unusual considering how many plays, films and art exhibition I've seen lately (I haven't read as much, unfortunately).

Instead of talking about the relative disappointment I've felt for films that have received public and critical acclaim (such as Milk, Doubt and Slumdog Millionaire), and what I consider the ridiculous overlooking of Clint Eastwood's magnificent Gran Torino, I want to talk briefly about the masterpiece of 2008: Waltz With Bashir, by the Israeli director Ari Folman.



It's a film that has that rare quality of succeding in being a number of things at the same time, all successfully: topical (the disaster that is the Middle East now, and the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in particular) and historical (the 1982 Lebanon war and the massacre of Sabra and Shatila); political (Folman's condemnation of the Israeli military and ruling classes of the time and of now is presented indirectly, but without appeal) and highly personal (it's about recuperating one's memory by facing responsibility and guilt; dreams and nightmares; being young and then suddenly old); documentary and "fiction", thanks to the use of real interviews and the structure of an investigative piece, but presenting them through animation, which allows for beauty and poetry to surface even amid the horror of wars.

We follow the director/protagonist as he tries to remember his partecipation in the Lebanon war and especially what exactly he was doing during the three days he, together with the Israeli army, supported the siege of the Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut by the Christian Phalangists, who massacred what conservative estimates put around 3000 civilians, including women and children.

In order to make sense of a recurrent dream that haunts him but that still doesn't allow him to recollect those days, Folman needs to talk with fellow soldiers, witnesses, journalists, politicians. The perspective is entirely Israeli, because it's about an Israeli soldier dealing with his role in the war.

Folman manages to connect the scenes of that war to our collective cultural visualisation of both Vietnam and Iraq; but in the final, devastating part set in the Palestinian compound, the references to our visual unconscious on the Warsaw ghetto and WWII, are even more chilling.

When the protagonist finally pieces his own personal and national history together, he can remember, at last. And what he remembers is so terrible that the animation is replaced by the real, uncensored scenes of what the news people found in Sabra and Shatila when they were finally allowed to enter.

No words, no music, because memory cannot and should not always be rendered poetic or exorcised by art. Sometimes what we need to do, more than anything else, is just remember.