Waltz With Bashir
Difficult to remember, impossible to forget
Every war generation processes horror and guilt in its own fashion, but Ari Folman has come up with a truly unprecedented genre: the animated repressed-memory atrocity-mystery documentary. Watching "Waltz With Bashir," Israel's entry for the 2008 foreign language Oscar, you feel like a 19th-century naturalist presented with a platypus. How can something made from so many different pieces draw breath?
"Waltz With Bashir" not only breathes but it howls - and sobs and curses and croons and, in the end, when sound proves useless in the face of calamity, falls into awful silence. The film is concerned with events of the 1982 Lebanon War but its echoes volley off the current conflict in Gaza, the history of Israel, the history of the Jews - the history of war itself. The film, devastating and distressing in equal measure, widens in meaning as it narrows in scope.
It begins very simply. Folman visits a friend, Boaz, who tells of recurring nightmares about the dogs he shot while on patrol in Lebanon, lest their barking wake the enemy. Afterward, the filmmaker realizes he has no memories of his own from the period. A quarter century on, the best he can come up with is a jagged image of fellow soldiers rising naked from a livid sea and coming ashore at the foot of bombed-out high-rises.
This film, then, is Folman's investigation into his own past and his generation's. "Waltz With Bashir" is animated, one senses, out of self-protection - from a need to get close to the nub of trauma while keeping it abstract enough to confront. The visuals are awkwardly realistic, similar to the rotoscoping technique used in films like "Waking Life" and "Chicago 10" but not quite as convincing. The colors are nightmarish; the movements have the repetitive smoothness of a Web cartoon. Animation serves as a diving suit here, allowing the director to plumb his psychic depths, but it's leakier than he'd like.
Still, as a therapist friend tells Folman, "We don't go places where we really don't want to go." So the filmmaker heads off to interview high school pals and platoon-mates, hoping their memories will give shape to his, like blips on a sonar screen. In Holland, he visits a friend who has made a fortune selling falafel to health-conscious Europeans and who recalls shooting up a Mercedes full of Arab innocents in a blind panic.
Other men remember other horrors: a child sniper shot to pieces in an Eden-like forest; a junkyard full of body parts; a soldier who watches his platoon wiped out and then floats through the night sea back to his regiment, feeling calm bleed into survivor guilt. Each step of "Waltz With Bashir" brings us closer to what one character calls the "disassociative event" - the September 1982 massacre of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.
The killers were Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen, revenge-crazed over the assassination of President-elect Bashir Gemayel two days earlier. The camps were ostensibly protected by the Israeli Defense Force, of which Folman was a member. At first the filmmaker only knows he was within several hundred yards of the genocide, separated from it by soldiers and walls. Then, as his friends' memories chip away at his subconscious, "Waltz With Bashir" burrows closer toward the black core of personal experience. The IDF sent up flares. They only served to let the Phalangists see the women and children they were murdering.
At its rueful heart, the movie is a meditation on the lines where being present at an atrocity turns into being complicit, where complicity shades into guilt, where guilt becomes a shadow identity. Who knows how far up the Israeli chain of command knowledge of the massacre went? Folman's parents survived Auschwitz, and the line "Waltz With Bashir" brushes with its most inarticulate loathing is where a Jew might become a Nazi. Memory here becomes an act of poisoned expiation.
And then it becomes simply memory: bearing witness, no more. At the very end, when Folman has tunneled far enough into his past, he lets go of animation like an unwanted life vest and throws himself and us onto the rocks of real life. Footage from the camps in 1982; stunned women wailing "Photograph this!"; something unspeakable lying under an overhang of rubble. "Waltz" at last looks and sees and understands, and that understanding is the coldest comfort of all. 