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Waltz With Bashir

Critic's Pick Critics' Pick

(No longer in theaters)
  • Rating: R — for some disturbing images of atrocities, strong violence, brief nudity and a scene of graphic sexual content
  • Director: Ari Folman   Cast: Ron Ben-Yishai, Ronny Dayag, Ari Folman, Dror Harazi, Yehezkel Lazarov
  • Running Time: 90 minutes
  • Reader Rating: Write a Review

Genre

Animation, Documentary

Producer

Ari Folman

Distributor

Sony Pictures Classics

Release Date

Dec 25, 2008

Release Notes

NY

Official Website

Review

"Speak, memory,” commanded Vladimir Nabokov, and it’s a nice enough thought—but in the Israeli animated masterpiece Waltz With Bashir, memory only stutters, yowls, and babbles in tongues. To translate, a new form is needed, with more fluid boundaries between documentary and fantasy, reality and dreams, life and art. What we get is both a detective story and a head-trip. The movie’s writer, director, and protagonist, Ari Folman, was 19 when he went to war in Lebanon in 1982, and he does not, he tells a friend, have distinct recollections of what he saw and did—especially on the days and nights of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, when Christian Phalangists murdered hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children. Waltz With Bashir begins with a dream recounted by one of Folman’s friends: Snarling dogs emerge from the night shadows and bound through the streets of Tel Aviv, their eyes a radioactive yellow to match the clouds scudding above them, converging under the dreamer’s window and snapping at his face. That opening, with Max Richter’s pounding drums, puts the vision in our faces, too: It’s Folman shouting, “Cry havoc, and let loose the dogs of remembrance!”

One vision above all haunts Waltz With Bashir: soldiers, principally the young Folman, emerging naked from the sea and pulling their uniforms on their elongated bodies to Richter’s shimmering synthesizers. Folman slings his rifle over his shoulder and heads into Beirut. Women surge past him going—where? The camera can’t see beyond his face. The style of the movie shifts: He and a friend sit in a café, barely transformed, musing on whether films such as his can be therapeutic. Ho-hum, you say, Jews talking about therapy, what else is new? Except this isn’t New York, it’s Israel, which has a culture more repressed than its volubility would lead you to believe. (Monosyllabic Scandinavians don’t have a corner on buried traumas.) As Folman interviews his combat buddies, other soldiers, a reporter, and a psychologically astute friend, the narrative baton is passed. Now the backdrops are photo-realistic, now surreal. The music segues from raucous rock to dainty classical as a soldier dances among posters of the assassinated Lebanese president-elect Bashir Gemayel, his machine gun chattering like an electric guitar. Even the most lambent passages have a feverish urgency.

So many modern war films center not on rousing battles but the horror of civilian casualties, and on soldiers racked by flashbacks over things they can’t fully recall—things they saw, did, or didn’t do. Some filmmakers use images of slaughtered women and children for cheap shocks; others are more scrupulous, but so literal-minded that our defenses fly up. It has taken an animated film to go where live-action dramas and even documentaries haven’t—to tickle our synapses and slip into our bloodstream. The end of Waltz With Bashir rockets us out of the unconscious: The cartoon women surging past the young Folman become newsreel-real, their unholy keening recorded at the scene. The director has used every drop of his artistry to open us up to the sting of death.

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