AN ANIMATED DOCUMENTARY? With Waltz with Bashir Israeli film-maker Ari Folman has created something unique. Even better, he's made something that can't just be dismissed as a technical gimmick. Rather, it's a serious attempt to combine the truth
-essaying immediacy of the documentary form with what Werner Herzog calls "the ecstatic truth" of artistic expression – which is a rather highfalutin' way of saying it uncovers meaning where facts alone often fail.
That's particularly pertinent to Folman, who is attempting to shed light on the murky moral waters of Israel's 1982 war in Lebanon by recovering his suppressed memories of his time in Beirut as a teen conscript in the Israeli Defence Force. A chat with a friend and fellow soldier, who confides that he is still haunted by a war-inspired dream, is the event that forces Folman to confront the fact that he has no recollection of this period in his life, and it's a revelation so disturbing that he's struck by a lucid vision of himself emerging naked from the sea on a beach in Beirut while illumination rounds light up the night sky.
Determined to understand what this image means, and why he can't remember anything else, he embarks on a mission to track down and interview old army colleagues , and discovers their stories.
It's here that Folman's audacious stylistic choice comes into its own. Retaining the original voices of his interviewees, Folman and his team of animators have recreated their appearance from scratch using hand-drawn animation, embellishing their stories, dreams and hallucinatory reminisces with wild visuals that capture both the surreal nature of war and the distorting effect the passage of time has on memory. It's stunning stuff, and the film reinforces its devastating anti-war message in its final moments.
It's a shame the DVD extras aren't up to much. Teaser trailers and a ten-minute interview with Folman are hardly worthy of such a groundbreaking production.
Anyone seeking an unreconstructed film about combat this week should probably check out The Wild Geese: Special Edition. Despite dubious post-colonial attitudes to African natives, the classic Brit men-on-a-mission movie holds up surprisingly well, thanks to the central triumvirate of Richard Burton, Richard Harris and Roger Moore. Cast here as gentlemen mercenaries, they're hired to lead a distinctly over-the-hill group of soldiers on a highly dangerous mission to central Africa to rescue a wrongly imprisoned leader sympathetic to their paymasters. Released in 1978, it takes an age to get going, and the blunt characterisation telegraphs the fates of the protagonists. But the action itself is effective in an old-school way and, thanks to the interest generated by Quentin Tarantino's imminent Brad Pitt-starring (and annoyingly spelled) Second World War film Inglorious Basterds, this kind of filmmaking seems due a comeback. Indeed, that perennial Tarantino copyist Guy Ritchie has already been linked to a Wild Geese remake, so watch the original now before everything that's good about it is completely bastardised. The DVD comes with a Roger Moore commentary, a documentary on the film's legendary Brit producer Euan Lloyd and an amusingly retro vintage newsreel report from the original premiere.
The full article contains 561 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
