Review: Waltz with Bashir
Ari Folman’s animated documentary Waltz with Bashir begins with a feverish dream about a memory and concludes with the cool remove of a moment frozen in time by news cameras. How one arrives at the other is the central question of the film.
It starts with a pack of wild-eyed dogs, hurling with ferocious velocity through the indigo streets of Tel Aviv. Barking and snarling, they come to the foot of an apartment building, as far as they can go. Watching from above is a solitary figure. He is the dreamer, an ex-soldier and friend of the filmmaker. And, as he tells Folman, there are exactly 26 hounds, one for each guard dog that he shot more than 20 years ago. They’ve come to exact their revenge.
Folman, too, was in combat as the Israeli Defense Forces pushed into Lebanon. But Folman has no recall of that time, save for a disturbing memory of starkly naked soldiers — himself among them — emerging from the water onto the shores of Beirut as flares illuminate the ferrous skyline.
In September 1982, Lebanese Christian militiamen slaughtered at least hundreds of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps to avenge the assassination of Bashir Gemayel, Lebanon’s newly elected president. Israelis, who could have taken action, never put a stop to the massacre. How guilty are they?
Folman sets out to interview other veterans, psychologists and historians. What follows is a journey that is both violent and intensely reflective, equal parts fantasy and reality. Parts of the film do follow a more conventional documentary technique, with interviewees appearing as talking heads onscreen. But the memories take shape as animated forms, so that they are able to retain their fluidity in time, and even insulated from the laws of physics. At times, less is more as Folman drained them of color and dimension — most scenes are monochromatic, the background flattened to emphasize their symbolism and surrealism.
“Memory is dynamic. It’s alive,” one friend tells Folman. “If some details are missing, memory fills the holes with things that never happened.”
In the episode that gives title to the film, one man tells of a soldier who ran out into a crossfire as if he’d lost his mind. Time in suspense, the man danced for seemingly forever as bullets flew all about him. All around the street lay giant portraits of the freshly assassinated Bashir.
