Waltz with Bashir [Vals Im Bashir] (**½)

Directed by: Ari Folman

Starring (voices): Ari Folman, Ronny Dayag, Ron Ben-Yishai, Dror Harazi

Seen: January 6^th 2010

**½ Out of ****

Waltz with Bashir is a rather haunting animated depiction of the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, told by Ari Folman. The film follows a documentary perspective, with Folman interviewing fellow soldiers many years after the conflict in an effort to reconstruct his own lost memories of events. This all starts for Folman when one of his friends tells him of his nightmares in connection with the conflict in the year 2006, 24 years later. Before this he had regressed all the memories, but his friend’s nightmares unlock something in his mind, and his memories start returning, even though they are hazy at first. He only sees a vision from the Sabra and Shatila Massacre, but is unable to tell what really happened.

He is advised by a friend to find and interview as many people connected to this as he possibly can, and he does exactly this, going into his fractured memories to see who was there and who comes next. Along the way he also interviews Ron Ben-Yishai, a war reporter who had almost celebrity-like status at the time of the conflict. And right at the end of the movie the animation dissolves into true footage from the massacre – a shock that not many people will be able to easily deal with.

Waltz with Bashir gets its title from a scene where Shmuel Frenkel, one of Folman’s interviewees, and the then commander of his unit grabs a light machine gun and runs shooting into the street, with Chopin’s Waltz in C Sharp playing, while the platoon is cornered by snipers firing at them with posters of Bashir Gemayel all around them in the streets of Beirut.

The animation in Waltz with Bashir is inspired, everything taking on a brown-yellow hue, with only certain small parts getting the “courtesy” of more colours – blood for one. The entire film presents the viewer with war and the atrocities committed during war in animated format, which in itself is pretty heavy stuff. But what gives the film its high age restriction is not that, it is a graphic pornographic film that one character watches during the movie, showing hard-core sex (animated, but completely unnecessary to the film). Why this was included in the film is anyone’s guess, but it had no place in what could have been a much more effective and widely promotable documentary. Just that one minute threw a lot of credibility out of the window if you ask me.

The reality of events are blunted in a way up to the point where the animation transforms into real footage, when you are hit hard by images of dead and dying people, bodies strewn everywhere and people walking around wailing in sorrow. The plight of the Sabra and Shatila people have now been made public – and because of the wide acclaim this film has received from all across the world it is not shared with just a few. Let’s just hope this documentary film can help prevent massacres like this in future.