One doesn’t often run into a movie that gets a “10” out of a possible “10” on imdb. com. “Waltzing with Bashir” is one of those films. It’s animation, certainly not Disney, about war but certainly not heroics, religious but certainly not preachy. The theme might have been from Job: “I alone escaped to tell you,” except that it is deeply collaborative.
The reason it is animated is not to simplify but to address complexity; not to sentimentalize but to confront. It only escaped censorship by fortuitous political accident (that the “bad guys” were not politically aligned with those in power) and maybe because no one really understood what they were doing until it was nearly done.
The starting point was the final point in a massacre that happened when Israel invaded Lebanon. Actual footage, blurry and sun-bleached as though it were vacation footage, showed ululating, shrieking, wailing Lebanese women returning to a refugee camp where all the men and many women, children, and old men had been shot over a three day period. The actual shooters were Christian Phalangist forces who also took people away in trucks reminiscent of the removals of Jews in Germany. They carved crosses on the chests of the men. Jesus wept. It was not enough. This footage is the end of the movie that shows in animation what cannot be shown in real life, fantasies as well as atrocities.
The beginning point is a recurring dream by one former Israeli soldier confiding in another, who discloses that he also has a memory of that sort, but actually has mostly blank spots around the massacre. He doesn’t know whether he witnessed, killed, did something brave or simply was not there. His vision shows him rising from the sea with two others and walking onto the beach. It is in near-Halloween colors, lit by yellow flares and backed by the tall layered buildings of high-density beach front condos.
I had not thought before about what it meant to be fighting a war in countries where most of the population -- certainly the urban population -- was along the beach. For one thing the sea makes a powerful metaphor for the unconscious, that huge reservoir from which can rise visions of salvation, like the giant woman who comes to a boat full of revelers and lifts out one man in time to save him from bomb blasts: nightmares of death. Another soldier, separated and abandoned by his company, was able to swim home -- it was six miles but he was powered by fear. At the other extreme, soldiers on the beach waiting for action could surf and play beach volleyball, toking up and swilling down as though they were on vacation.
In reality the writer/producer/director, Ari Folman, gathered a small group of animators who began with interviews of soldiers who wished to share their memories. These were distilled into subjects that haunted the men. (There were no female soldiers.) For example, many found the deaths and maimings of the beautiful Arabian horses at the Hippodrome far more unreal and tragic than the deaths of the humans, in part because the horses were blameless. In orchards the soldiers were attacked by children with RPG’s -- children of eight or nine years old, barely big enough to shoulder the weapon. They were shredded by machine gun fire. In this quite beautiful sequence the pathos is sharpened by formal classical music. In fact, throughout, the music is a powerful element right up to the title scene where a soldier, maddened by being pinned down by gunfire from those high rises where families cluster on the balconies to watch the war, takes his machine gun out in the open into a maniac waltz. Bashir, the sanctified leader of the Christian Phalangists, watches from posters everywhere.
One soldier is a flub-up consumed by guilt at not being able to save his companions, and another is a martial arts superman who during the war had identified himself by rubbing on patchouli so that even in pitch dark no one would mistake who he was. Ari had one friend who was a “wise man” he had grown up with. That is, one he could go to at any hour, knowing that the friend would listen to him and have answers for him -- interpretations that were Freudian and classical -- while all the time the friend’s children, growing up in safety, passed back and forth behind them. There is also an interview with a female therapist and expert on battle trauma.
This very small and intense crew of illustrators used a particular kind of animation. The figures were videotaped in a studio, partly so the sound would be clear, then drawn “freehand,” (They get very angry if you think they traced the videos!) then “exploded” or separated into sectors which were again separated. Those sub-bits of puzzle pieces were manipulated by computers according to instructions from a program available on the open market and sometimes used by children. Kids never build so many layers.
No child -- and few not raised in the constant introspection and moral analysis of the Israeli context -- would be capable of this kind of courageous inquiry. As the main character says, “What if I find out something about myself that is unbearable to know?” The wise friend assures him that his own mind won’t let him know what he can’t handle.
The conclusion he comes to about the massacre is that it was not stopped because those who could have recognized its wickedness were literally too close to understand what was happening. They could see bits and pieces, but not assemble them into a deliberate holocaust. (Mind the echo of the animation.) In the end it was a war correspondent, a man of such fatalistic courage that it’s still a bit unbelievable that he survived, who -- receiving information from many -- picked up the phone in this small country and told the president what was happening. Probably the president already knew, but didn’t want that to be known.
After three days of deliberate, systematic killing, the massacre ends simply. A high officer pulls up at the edge of the camp in an SUV, steps out with a bull horn, announces “The shooting is over. Everyone go home.” They do. And then the women begin to wail.
The soldiers, those who escaped to tell us, either forget or remember. What they do with that is an individual moral responsibility. That so many choose to remember confronts Israel with its own moral failure.
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