Waltz with Bashir

WwB starts with an empty street under a threatening sky. Suddenly we see a dog running towards the camera. It is joined by other dogs. The tension keeps building as their numbers increase. The music strikes an ominous note and the beat builds up as a prologue to a climax. One keeps watching in anticipation to find out what is it that they are chasing.

Of course one has seen such openings. Films start with a bang. Bullets flying. Explosion. Extreme action. Special effects. But animation? You think this is just the opening credits. The real film will start soon. But it doesn’t. The animation sequence continues. Except this is not any other animation film. This is a memoir, a documentary, a story – all kneaded into a graphic novel meets a war comic.

The film tells round the story of a group of soldiers who were part of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon of 1982. The protagonist has problems trying to remember his role and what he was doing on a fateful night – when Lebanese militia with the support of Israeli forces massacred thousands of Palestinian refugees.

But the story is told in layers and as you meet several soldiers who were part of the invasion tell their version of the story. Most of them refuse to discuss the massacre and like the protagonist want to pretend that they were not responsible for it. They discuss the horrors of the war and their first response to killings and gunfire. The sequence where they are singing as they cross over the Lebanon and their celebrations are brought to an end with a single bullet is telling.

The film uses various techniques to reveal the story. Interviews, discussions, “war footage” played with the audio of someone relating his version of the invasion. However this is not a documentary. In between there are surreal moments where a lady emerges from the sea to put one of the young soldiers to sleep.

The centrepiece of the film is the scene where one of the soldiers grabs a gun and starts firing randomly, dancing around like a waltz since they cannot spot the snipers who are killing the soldiers in the dark. This soldier gets scared that he will not make it with a smaller gun and snatches a machine gun and runs into the line of bullets. The narrator describes the dance as a poetic event but we are never too far away from the horror.

Usually an animation film strips emotions to the basics. Often we assume that one cannot use animation to depict events or complex emotions. However WwB discusses the nature of war and how helpless one feels when faced with its horrors. The reaction of the soldiers’ to the massacre is either helplessness or innocence. The film does not condemn their attitude but tries to look at why they behaved that way and how they continue to avoid facing the truth even today.

Waltz with Bashir does not prepare you for what you are about to see. When was the last time you saw a film where the story and the style flowed one into the other and yet shocked you in the end? This is one such film.