Review of "Waltz with Bashir"

Waltz with Bashir, 2008

Directed by: Ari Folman
Screenwriter: Ari Folman
Music by: Max Richter
Photography by: Animation
Genre: Documentary, Animation
Main actors:
Animation:

Ari Folman
Ron Ben-Yishai
Ronny Davag


The director Ari Folman talks with an old friend, who is having a horrible nightmare in which is chased by 26 barking dogs. They reach the conclusion that the dogs come from war memories. Ari is surprised because he doesn’t remember anything about the time he fought in the Lebanese war in 1982. Ari decides to visit his old colleagues and to interview Israeli soldiers with the intention to reconstruct a forgotten past.

“Waltz with Bashir” is an animated documentary where the Israeli director, Ari Folman, reconstructs a mental puzzle trying to remember his participation in the war. He has completely forgotten everything about those horrible times and during the conversations with his psychologist he finds out that the brain can be extremely selective. He only has a particular memory in his head, in which he is naked in the sea with two colleagues in front of Beirut and suddenly the sky becomes powerfully yellow, then the three young men get dressed in their soldier uniform and stare into the city. Ari decides to investigate his past, he interviews old friends and former soldiers in order to know what role he had in the war; his journey along a surrealistic, crude and violent universe is one of the most amazing and shocking experiences I ever had in a movie theatre.

The animated images gives an extraordinary potency to the film, they aggressively catch the viewer like the 26 enraged dogs do with Folman’s friend in his dream. The movie couldn’t be done in other way, the animated images allow the director to explore the oneiric world and memories of his friends about the war, and they relatively reduce the shock that the facts explained in the film would produced if the movie was done in a traditional way. I have to say that I am hypnotized by the amazing visual style of the animated images (created with flash techniques and 3D) that mixed together with the shattering soundtrack gives an exceptional atmosphere to the film.

The sequence where an Israeli commander gives orders to destruct a red Mercedes that probably hides a high quantity of explosives it is deeply significant of the current reality in Gaza today. We contemplate the soldiers trying to destroy savagely the car: they shoot missiles from a tank, they use violently the shotguns, and also they throw bombs from an airplane; the crude result of the operation is that the red Mercedes has escaped undamaged and all the houses and the surrounding area have been brutally destroyed.

The catharsis of the story is the massive murder that happens in the Palestinian refugee camp of Sabra and Shatila. The Christian Falangist militia in revenge of the assassination of his leader, Bashir Gemael, kills without any regret the inhabitants of the area. Among the Israeli soldiers there’s a lot of confusion; some of them apparently don’t know what’s going on, others just contemplate the action with incredulity. Lots of families have been destroyed in front of the passive eyes of the Israeli army. Are they guilty? The movie doesn’t answer the question, that’s not the point of the film. The objective is to show how devastating can be the consequences of war. The final sequence reminds the viewer that the story that he has contemplated is real, the animated images leave the screen allowing the entrance of newsreel footages of the massacre. The closing has an extraordinary impact to the audience, for sensitive personalities would be a strong psychological shock, maybe the human nature is not prepared to feel the horror so closely.