The animated documentary Waltz With Bashir has, interestingly, been critically acclaimed in all British reviews so far. Admirers have talked about the film’s uncomfortable parallels, clearly drawn between the Holocaust and the 1982 massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon.
To flash back briefly to that time: the popular (with Christians) Maronite president of Lebanon, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated, and the next day Christian Phalangist militia retaliated by storming two Palestinian refugee camps. The death toll has been estimated as anywhere between 328 and 3,500. At the time of the massacres, the Israeli Defense Force controlled the borders of the camps and provided close logistical support to Phalangists.
Waltz With Bashir opens in a bar on a rainy night. After drinking and talking with a memory-burdened friend, protagonist-director Ari Folman realises that he can’t remember any of his military experience in Lebanon as a 19-year-old. He remembers going there, and then every break he had coming home to a bizarrely secure-feeling homeland of sunshine and nightclubs. But Lebanon itself, the beaches, Beirut and the camps, has been cleanly rubbed out of his brain.
So Ari goes in search of people who were there with him, in hope of breaking down the wall obscuring that part of his past. And the journey is hypnotic; the animated images are gorgeous, stylish and haunting, their gritty texture and pea-fog-yellow colour references bringing to mind the actual feel of a Beirut exhausted by occupations and clogged with rubble. This medium lets the interviewees’ emotions and hallucinations play out in an amazing way. And, amping up the contrast with the film’s task of retrieving and mourning for lost days of youth, the jokes range from Monty Python to the blackest, Joseph Heller-genre comedy. As part of his investigation, Ari tracks down one of his old regiment mates in a martial arts studio, where the guy explains the importance of patchouli oil (‘Patchouli is a way of life’). In another, more introspective bit, Ari describes how he used to fantasise about his own death – his girlfriend had dumped him right before he was sent to Lebanon, and he is almost excited for his own funeral because her imagined guilt and melodramatic tears make for a sweet picture of revenge.
The stories he amasses are illuminating, awful and surreal. Ultimately, Folman’s interviews, and his eventual personal journey into memory, place the Phalangists as the Nazis in control of the killing. And it is the genetic memory of those other camps – Auschwitz specifically – that has made Ari’s brain cope in this way, through a haze of dissociation. So if you’re examining the film for statements surrounding the responsibility for Sabra and Shatila, you may find its political prejudice uninteresting. Folman and his friends weren’t aware of what was happening around them; they only followed orders. This personal Apocalypse Now for our times is also a gesture of avoidance; through the handful of interviewees, none remembered witnessing the killings at Sabra and Shatila, much less partaking in anything more than setting off flares to light the way by night. Instead, Israeli commanders speak of indirect reports, which were forwarded to a sinisterly unworried Ariel Sharon. But this is nothing new; Sharon was first declared personally responsible for the massacres by an Israeli enquiry back in 1983.
Secondary to this point for controversy, the animation-to-live footage switch at the end of the film was a divisive and horrifying move. The last half hour of the film is when the narrative starts to come around; you begin to anticipate Ari finally locating himself on a battleground and the chain of images tightens around the viewer’s mind like a vice. Abruptly, the drawings turn into a few frames of BBC and ITN news footage of Palestinian women finding the bodies of their families in the camps after the massacres. Mark Kermode disagreed with this decision of Folman's, but it does add something, maybe a pre-emptive defence against critics of the ‘escapist’ technique of using those moody, graphic representations of reality for most of the film.
This is magnificent and intensely moving work; I’d even say that, if you are in any way close to any of the events depicted, you shouldn’t see it, because it was a completely draining experience enough for an outsider. When it ended and the credits started to roll, no one in the tiny, airless cinema space moved or spoke for at least 15 minutes. Someone behind me was sobbing. As a friend said during the shellshocked post-film commentary, in our time of hyperreality and life lived through avatars, to portray a documentary story using animation, as Folman did, and to delve into a murky, horribly violent time and place using the combination of electronic / 80s music and moving cartoons, like he used, is a dazzlingly effective way of doing it.
