Cast: Ari Folman

Director: Ari Folman

Screenplay: Ari Folman

Running time: 1 hr 30 mins

Genre: Animation/Documentary



CRITIQUE:


Perhaps very rarely one can recite a truly great film that comes from Israel. Well that popular ignoramus, folks, is soon to be changed. Waltz with Bashir will surely penetrate the filmic universe, and a kind of movie that will be talked about even twenty years from now. Yes, that’s serious credibility. By the knowledge that this is the first ever animated-documentary, one would inevitable muster: “what the hell were they thinking?” Of course, the concept is frighteningly inappropriate. After all, how could animation enliven the harsh brutality of war? Having seen the film, there’s no doubt of the medium employed. In fact, there could have been no other way this film could tackle such a deep, subconcious issues of war, trauma and psychological wounds, all inflicted by the Lebanese-Israeli war.


The film starts with a nightmare, a cluster of raving dogs haunt Ari Folman, as he is disturbed by a presence of a distant memory at the back of his mind. He recollects to try and stop the nightmare but fails despairingly. So he sets into an odyssey of recollections, interviews of co-soldiers (who have now lived different lives since theh aftermath). Remember that this is a documentary, but still the subjects were animated and so is the rest of the craft. It is visually striking, it transcends graphic contemporary art. Watch the slow-motion scene in a forest where soldiers march in, it glides with classical elegance. So innovative and subsequently effective, as the film assembles memories, hallucinations, images, all like warped or heightened sense of reality that delves deeper into the subconsious of humanity. Memory, the film puts, has the tendency to recreat events that didn’t occur or exist to cover a certain trauma. This borders of the psychological, but as the film steeps in the pysche of its protagonist – it’s ultimately the personal level that soars the most. Haunting and bleak, Folman is a man whose innocence is ravaged by war; scenes show him shooting aimlessly at fields, killing everyone at sight, and has a memory that shows a vision of an orange-tinged nightscape lit by flares, as a city massacre is about to befall, yet has a mind that doesn’t acknowledge the painful fact that he’s part of it. As most great war films go, it points out that war is not only hopeless but pointless, an exercise of authority and human greediness. Thanks to Folman for sidestepping clichés, and pulls this celluloid down to a personal portrait. This film is a confrontation of the memory, of all its nook and crannies, so when that final footage appears, a real reel of the result of war, it’s genuinely disquieting.


VERDICT:

Beautifully poetic and immensely devastating, never has a war film taken to a deeply personal level since Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Waltz with Bashir is daringly inventive, audacious and a transcendent portrait of the fallibility of memory and the painful pangs of a traumatic past. Unmissable!




RATING: A