'Waltz' marks a turning point

Israeli war films undergo a shift

Above: The animated documentary ''Waltz With Bashir'' by Ari Folman. It opens locally Jan. 16. (Courtesy of Sony Picture Classics)

There was a time, in the mid-1990s, when Israeli dramatic films were crammed to the rafters with Tel Aviv loft-dwellers and their romantic mishaps. There was another time, soon after the outbreak of the second Palestinian intifada, when seemingly every Israeli film was a war epic, or a documentary about the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Now, with Ari Folman's prize-winning "Waltz With Bashir," we have finally arrived at a synthesis: well-heeled Israelis, and their memories of madness and horror in wartime. The time is the present, but for the veterans of the first Lebanon war interviewed here, the calendar's pages are firmly glued together, 1982 never having given way to its successors. For the director, all recollection of the war itself has vanished from his mind, leaving only a solitary scrap of remembered image: a group of young men bobbing in the Mediterranean, staring out at seafront apartment towers as the sky glows a radioactive yellow. Hoping to find out what it means, Folman sets out in search of someone to fill in the gaps in his memory.

"Bashir," which opens locally Jan. 16, is a documentary with a difference: In lieu of talking heads, Folman's film is an animated film sculpted out of real interviews and genuine memories. Seeking out his wartime buddies, Folman asks them to remember what he cannot: the Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which Israeli soldiers stood idly by as Lebanese Phalangist troops slaughtered thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children. A mixture of Flash, 3-D, and traditional animation - think Richard Linklater's "Waking Life" gone to war - turns Lebanon into a phantasmagoric, disjointed cabinet of terrors. Working from filmed interviews painstakingly transformed into squiggly, black-red-and-yellow drawings, Folman has shaped the war in Lebanon into a memento mori that each of its participants must carry with them, wherever they go.

"Can't films be therapeutic?" Folman (who wrote and directed episodes of the Israeli television series that inspired "In Treatment") wonders toward the beginning of "Waltz With Bashir," and the question hangs over the entire film. Israeli war films - which include films about the occupation - have long served as a blood-soaked therapy session for a nation of veterans forged in the crucible of unending warfare. In recent years, with the collapse of the Oslo peace process, and the concomitant rise in violence, Israeli film has mounted a heroic search for root causes. Notably absent are any patriotic slogans or rah-rah cheerleading; in their stead is a stark analysis of the terrible costs of war. It is worth pointing out that few of these films are about the Six-Day War of 1967, that brief moment of national glory. They are about the Yom Kippur War, the Lebanon War, and the 40-year skirmish with the Palestinians in the occupied territories - long slogs hurtling their participants terrifyingly close to the abyss.

Amos Gitai's "Kippur" began the trend back in 2000, its soldiers more compelled to make love (or art) than war. As committed to capturing the immediacy and intensity of warfare as "Saving Private Ryan," "Kippur" offers none of the assurance of that Good War film. War is simply a fact of life in "Kippur," no different from painting a picture or getting stuck in a traffic jam, except for the extreme permanence of its consequences. There is no heroism in "Kippur" except for that of survival, and common decency. Himself a veteran of the war, Gitai turns that war into an emblem of the dreary, bloody, purposeless skirmishes that followed in its wake.

Joseph Cedar's 2007 Oscar-nominated "Beaufort" approaches Lebanon from another angle. Here, the soldiers are the sons of those who fought in 1982 - literally, in at least one case - and their mission is to hold an ancient fort in southern Lebanon for the last days of the Israeli occupation of the region, in 2000. The task is simultaneously perilous and pointless, and the skirmish is between those soldiers ill-inclined to be the last soldier to die for a lost cause, and their commander, whose sense of duty demands commitment to the very final instant. "Beaufort" shares with Folman's film a sense of the purposelessness of Israel's Lebanese incursion, with a far more traditionalist bent: This is a World War II platoon film in Hebrew, with the familiar motley crew of misfits serving together. The only difference is this platoon is fracturing rather than cohering, split in two by the dispute over just what their country might be doing in a foreign land.

Recent documentaries about the West Bank and Gaza - whether about the lives of the occupied, in Yoav Shamir's "Checkpoint," or the occupiers, in Yael Klopmann's "Storm of Emotions" - color the internecine conflicts between Israeli and Palestinian, and between Jew and Jew, in shades of khaki and camouflage. "Storm of Emotions" in particular masterfully unsettles viewers of all ideological stripes, its showdown between right-wing settlers and Israeli soldiers astounding for its peacefulness, tact, and raw emotion. Liberals horrified by the occupation might deplore the Israeli presence there, but what do you say to the teenage boy filling a bottle with Gazan sand before leaving his home for the very last time? The soldiers of "Checkpoint" are brutes dehumanized by their service, while those of "Storm of Emotions," overseeing the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, are heroically patient, but both challenge, in their own way, traditional portrayals of Israeli soldiers as machines built for war.

Taking a page out of the work of revisionist Israeli historians like Benny Morris and Avi Shlaim, "Bashir" deliberately turns away from top-down depictions of heroic Zionist generals single-handedly winning battles. Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon - the architects of the 1982 war - are almost entirely absent, replaced by grunts far from home, and desperately lacking guidance. The veterans of "Waltz With Bashir" engage in a sort of psychoanalysis at Folman's urging to expose the repressed images of their youth to the light. The film, too, is a relentlessly bleak assault of discordant imagery, both depicted and described: eggs being cooked on burnt-out cars, dying horses whinnying in Beirut's Hippodrome, a crucifix carved in a Palestinian's chest, a child's hand sticking out from a pile of rubble. The film is a waltz, not only with former Lebanese prime minister Bashir Gemayel, whose assassination prompted the massacres at Sabra and Shatila, but with memory.

Folman describes a dream in which a pack of wild dogs dashing through the nighttime streets of Beirut overturn chairs and tables and attack caf?? patrons. By the end of the film, when animation briefly gives way to real footage from 1982, and the stench of rotting flesh fills our nostrils, there is little doubt left about how much damage such beasts can do, when let off their leashes. Is it therapeutic to realize that at one time, you were nothing better than the accomplices of murderous canines? Only Folman and his fellow veterans can answer that question, but "Waltz With Bashir" is Israel's fullest-yet revision of its military mythos.