Review of Waltz with Bashir (2008) by Courtney S — 22 Jul 2010

There have been many movies that chronicle the trauma of war, and the trauma of its victims, but Waltz With Bashir is the first movie I`ve seen that gives an in-depth account of the trauma of the victimizer.

The movie is an animated documentary by Ari Folman, who stars as his own subject. The movie starts off in a dream of one of Ari`s former army friends. He meets up with Folman in a bar for drinks and tells him about the dream, and how he is having flashbacks to their presence at the Lebanon massacre in 1982. This causes Folman to ponder why he has no recollection of this period in his life. That night for the first time, Folman has a flashback to the war. We are given a confusing night time scene of a younger Folman and two other soldiers floating naked in the ocean, carrying their guns, watching flares rain down over Beirut. This scene is repeated three times in the movie, but many of the questions surrounding it are never resolved.

Needing to find out about his involvement in the massacre, Folman seeks out his old acquaintances from the army to help shed light on the flashback and his involvement in the massacre. Folman travels to their homes, and wherever else the men happen to be. All of them tell stories about their own presence around the time of the massacre. Each time we are given a flashback, with each man looking a bit younger, and each story providing personal profundity. These stories rarely involve Folman, and by the end of the movie he has gotten many more pieces of the puzzle than he started out with, but still no concrete answers.

For a long time after viewing this movie I wondered why Folman, who is not an animator, and who has never worked with animation before, would want to make an animated movie. Most of the movie is told from the perspective of memory, which in the First Act we are told by a psychologist, is not very good. Our ability to recall events is not as good as we would like to think; in fact some memories are completely made up altogether. High stress events involving trauma make memory even worse. The choice of animation gives the movie the same surreal quality as memory, in that it resembles something real. It also allows Folman to easily break inconvenient logic that doesn't apply to the mind`s eye. Things like being rescued by a giant blue woman just before the boat your on is about to explode.

There is only one scene that is not animated, and that is the very last scene. By now we have learned that Folman was one of the men firing the flares from his flashback. These flares lit up the city at night which allowed the killing of innocent Lebanese citizens to continue. His psychologist tells him that it`s important to remember that firing flares is not the same as firing at unarmed civilians. But Folman isn't looking for forgiveness, just closure. At that point the action cuts to the final scene, disturbing newsreel footage of dead bodies lining the streets of Beirut, (I don't think it`s a spoiler to give that away, the story`s been out for almost thirty years). The contrast of the animation and live action brought to mind the graphic novel Palestine, by Joe Sacco. That work largely chronicled individual accounts of Israeli brutality on Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank, from the perspective of Palestinians in the occupied territories. The animation in the graphic novel worked by creating a buffer for the audience against the violence. Once the shock of seeing live action violent images is removed, we can view the events with a sense of sobriety. Waltz With Bashir takes on that same quality, viewed from the perspective of faulty memory or not. Memory may distort the facts, but it does not distort the substance.