Waltz

An eccentric yet animated documentary, Waltz with Bashir took the audience into a surreal world of fear, confusion, and internal struggle. Directed by Ari Folman, Waltz with Bashir won six Israeli Academy Awards for its innovative style of reinventing a piece of Israeli history that claimed more than 3,000 defenseless Palestinian refugees. Waltz with Bashir took me off-guard, and soon during the film, I found myself paralyzed with the bizarreness of the massacre and the insanity of war itself.

“It could only be done by animation,” the director answered in a frank manner during the talk. If the film were a live interview of seven men, it wouldn’t have been possible. The animation format integrated the dream sequence of the vicious dogs and the emergence of men from the water with the overall theme of guilt and helplessness for the veterans from the 1982 Lebanon war. Veterans, similar to Ari Folman, found themselves unable to cope with the psychological distress, for they knew nothing about what had happened to them during the war. As memories were told from one to another, one usually found memories evolve overtime. In the end, the memories might not be what had exactly happened but what one wanted the memories to be.

One of the best scenes from the film was essentially the title itself, Waltz with Bashir. Brandishing the machine gun, one of Ari Folman’s commanders found himself surrounded by heavy enemy fire between walls with posters of Bashir Gemayel. In the scene, Ari Folman combined classical background music with the aimless shooting by the soldiers to express the absurdity of comparing battleground to ballroom. The sex scene, however, did not fit into the content of the film. The sex scene created almost an imbalance to the theme of the film, misplaced between two scenes that it has no connection with.

Although the film was animated, the last scene included documentary news footage of the Sabra and Shatila massacres. The news footage gave the audience a real picture of the death of 3,000 defenseless Palestinian refugees.