Film

Accepting a Golden Globe for Waltz with Bashir, director Ari Folman said he hoped that his children would one day be able to view the movie not as a documentary but as “an ancient video game that has nothing to do with life whatsoever.” That’s not only a plea for peace; in a roundabout way, it’s also a summary of the film’s strategy.

Israel’s foreign-language Oscar submission is all about dissociation—it starts from fragmented testimonies and sets out to make them tangible. The focal point for this animated documentary is Folman’s 1982 combat experiences in the First Lebanon War, of which he claims to have only one memory: a surreal (as drawn) image of his company’s arrival at the beaches of Beirut. What he’s forgotten, and what he aims to reconstruct, is his location during the Sabra and Shatila massacres, when Israeli-allied Lebanese Phalangist soldiers entered Palestinian refugee camps and slaughtered civilians as revenge for the assassination of their president-elect, Bashir Gemayel.

Some of what Folman’s fellow soldiers experienced has been displaced or rationalized: The movie opens with one man’s nightmare of being hounded by the 26 dogs he had slaughtered during the war (to prevent news of his platoon’s arrival). In the film’s central image, another man remembers imagining a barrage of gunfire as a waltz.

Contrary to the claims of some critics, the animation doesn’t aestheticize war inappropriately. To film the reenactments would have imposed an additional layer of realism on the proceedings, and one of Waltz’s goals is to distinguish truth from recollection. A sequence at the bombed-out Beirut airport plays in both “real” and fantasized versions. Folman wonders how he could have had front-row seats to a massacre and suppressed the memory; with some shame, he admits that when he was being deployed, he imagined getting killed would be the ultimate revenge on the girlfriend who had dumped him.

All of Folman’s friends emphasize their own pieces of the puzzle, and the movie seems strategically designed to move closer to civilians as it progresses. Contrary to what one might assume, Waltz was filmed as a documentary and then animated from scratch, rather than being rotoscoped in the manner of Waking Life. The flatness of the Flash animation keeps visual bombast to a minimum, even during surreal interludes.

Like Waking Life, Waltz concerns the subjective nature of memory; in the most Life-like scene, one of Folman’s friends describes an experiment in which subjects could be induced to remember a fairground that never existed. The film also recalls Hiroshima Mon Amour in its emphasis on the relationship between subjectivity and trauma—and like Folman’s quirky Saint Clara (1996), about a telekinetic Russian girl in Israel, the movie is indirectly about the power of the mind.

There are moments when Folman’s soul-searching can seem self-serving. “Can films be therapeutic?” that same friend asks; the question is implicit, and surely one Folman answered before picking up a camera. From a structural standpoint, it’s also convenient that he has only one memory of the war—although perhaps taking that claim literally is missing the point.

As Folman has said in interviews, it’s ironic that Israeli critics and audiences have received this incendiary film so rapturously—especially now, given the current conflict in Gaza. (Exiting the press screening at Cannes in May, one critic loudly proclaimed, “Hamas will love this.”) That’s even more true, in a sense, of the film’s international coronation: Waltz seems so specifically directed at Israeli audiences—a call for a national catharsis—that its popularity anywhere else speaks to its inherent power.