Waltz with Bashir

How deeply does war scar a soldier? ‘Waltz with Bashir’ opens with a stunning & eerie evocation of a war veteran’s nightmare. He sees a pack of feral dogs charging down the streets in pursuit of him. Soon, we cut to his wartime experience that explains the context of the dream so specifically, we see clearly the strongest emotion he must have towards having gone to war-Guilt.

This film from Israel has been called an animated war docudrama, which, right there, is a genre of its own. It was made by Ari Folman, a filmmaker who also fought for Israel in her invasion of Lebanon in 1982. A night of drinks with a fellow veteran leads Folman to the confounding realization that he has no memories of the war, but the conversation triggers a flashback where he sees himself entering war ravaged Beirut on a night lit up by flares. Everything that happens next is a build up to explain this vision as Folman retraces his role in the invasion through interviews with fellow soldiers. This may be the most productive work of art attributable to memory lapse.

Folman chose animation because of the girth of what he intended to show. His subjects share candid details about their experiences & visions during the war, and animation helps in depicting them through surreal, haunting visuals, set to a brooding electronic score by composer Max Richter. One scene evokes a scared soldier’s vision of a giant amazon carrying him away from the ship that ferries his regiment to a surprise attack. Shooting this scene in a regular film could be possible with CGI but it wouldn’t be nearly as beautiful as it is here. Then there’s a fascinating recreation of a soldier escaping towards the seashore after his commander has been shot down and his tank blown up. He hides behind a rock, hoping that his regiment would stand their ground and rescue him, but they retreat. Seeing his forces abandon him to imminent death, he instinctively recollects the overwhelming security he felt in his mother’s arms as a child. Folman cuts to show mother & child locked in embrace in the middle of the crossfire. The interlude captures the trapped soldier’s trauma with rare poignance. The soldier slips into the sea in the dark and lives to tell the tale.

Folman’s own troubling memories resurface during the course of the interviews and the film shows them correspondingly. They include a bizarre trip to the Beirut Airport, where he wanders through his hallucination of a swanky airport complete with duty free shops lining the hallway. We see Folman snapping out of it to find the airport wrecked & the segue between illusion and reality is kinda awesome in underlining the devastation. The context of his flashback is revealed in the final interviews recounting the massacre of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra & Shatila refugee camps at the hands of the Lebanese Phalangists, out to avenge the assassination of their leader Bashir Gemayel.

Keeping with the phantasmagoric mood of the film, the title is derived from a scene where a soldier literally breaks into a waltz while shooting at Palestinian radicals, in the backdrop of a huge poster of Bashir Gemayel. At one level perhaps, Folman may have chosen the name as a sublime allusion to Israel’s complicity in allowing Bashir’s partymen (largely Maronite Christians) to enter Palestinian refugee camps and commit genocide. Yet this is a film that’s less about Bashir or the politics behind the Israeli invasion than it is about the waltz, the mad futility of going to war and the consequent spiritual toll.

‘Waltz with Bashir’ is one of the most significant, extraordinarily profound & oddly beautiful film of our times. We’ve seen war films projecting soldiers who are stirred purely by patriotism. Folman seems to be hinting that this may not be true, at least not for his subjects anyway. They were just boys who may not have had a full grasp of what they were doing and why. One of the interviewee shares that he became a soldier to escape being branded a nerd. Consider that Folman himself was obsessed, not with ideology, but his own death so it riddles his ex-girlfriend with guilt for breaking up with him. Lives were lost in service to these motives. This is not the coming of age they’d hoped for. I think the filmmaker regards this with sadness.

The supreme point of this work, I suspect, is to come to terms with the scars that Folman & his brothers carry & must live on with. It was perhaps Bertrand Russell who once said that war doesn’t determine who’s right, just who’s left. Yes, and it’s the soldier who pays the biggest price.