Movie Review : Waltz with Bashir

It is official that I’m now obsessed with watching foreign movies since the products from the stable of {H,B,K,T}ollywood rarely excite me nowadays. Now on to the review of this week.

I’ve watched a lot of war movies. And most of them fell into the category of movies that hailed American heroisms in World wars or the bowel-troubling Nazi horrors. On a few occasions we had a glimpse of the cruel civil wars in Africa too. The latest trend seems to be the war in Iraq.

Waltz With Bashir is different. A film director(Ari Folman), who had lost his memories of being a soldier in the 1982 Lebanon war, goes about talking to people who serviced with him during the war in order to rebuild his memories. The movie gallops between the present and the past as the participants in the movie recall their nightmares from the war.

More than the subject under discussion, it is the way the movie has been handled that’s quite striking. Rarely do you come across a part-documentary part-fiction movie in the form of an animation. The style of animation is innovative and it works extremely well with the subject of the movie. The animation is dark, comic and yet serious. Obviously, there is a comfort level to do this movie in animation as you don’t have to fret over building exhaustive sets of refugee camps that got destroyed 28 years ago. The music is quite simple and complements the movie well by not going overboard at any point in the movie. The real footages after the massacre (not animation) at the end of the movie are really disturbing, but I thought these scenes could have been avoided as they really didn’t fit the movie.

The movie works on several levels. It not only depicts the massacre in gut wrenching details, but also deals with the psychological issues such as guilt, amnesia, nightmares faced by the war veterans.

It is a bold attempt from an Israeli director to take a movie criticizing his own country’s role in the massacre during the Lebanon war. You need guts for doing that and it is more heartening to know that such freedom of expression exists in Israel.

Give it a try if you are game for different experience.