Review: Waltz with Bashir

The movie Waltz with Bashir opens with a pack of hounds running through a generic urban neighborhood. The hounds stop at the foot of an apartment block and wait... salivating...

This is pretty much a complete glimpse into what the movie is about. The collective amnesia in Israel about the beginning of the war in Lebanon in 1982 which manifests itself as nightmares in the various people we come to see in the movie. No memory is complete. The director gathers fragments from others' memories in an attempt to get a clear picture of what happened. He needs this to understand his own nightmare which is small fragment of a gruesome incident he knew he had participated in - the massacre at the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila.

The movie is almost entirely in animation and consists of the director Ari Folman talking to various people who were in the military during the war. Each person has a personal spin to the incident and remembers the events from his own vantage point - a captain who used a certain kind of oil so that his people could follow him by smell in the dark; another one recalls their captain in perpetually in a bathrobe watching TV in a building they had taken over just outside Beirut.

This narrative style takes away the political message. There is no good and bad judgment about the actions of Israel. However, it is a searing condemnation of the havoc war wreaks on the winners as well as the losers.