Supplied

One-Two-Three, One-Two-Three | The young Ari Folman arrives in Lebanon in the animated Waltz With Bashir.

WALTZ WITH BASHIR
Directed by Ari Folman. Opens Fri, Feb 20.
****1/2

When the former Israeli soldiers in Waltz With Bashir talk about the Lebanese civil war, they seem to remember their dreams more vividly than their waking hours. Boaz Rein-Buskila, now an accountant, is plagued by nightmares of a pack of wild, slavering dogs charging down the street, surrounding his house, and demanding he give himself up. Carmi Cna’an, now the wealthy owner of a chain of Dutch falafel stands, recalls sitting, terrified and nauseous, in the boat taking him to Beirut and having a vision of a giant naked woman climbing on board, taking him gently in her arms, and swimming away with him, far away from combat. (The image is simultaneously erotic, sad, creepy, and comforting.) And Ari Folman, now a filmmaker, has the most puzzling dream of all — his only memory of his entire tour of duty in Beirut is of him and his fellow soldiers walking naked out of the water, putting on their clothes, and walking down the eerily quiet streets, through a sea of black-clad women.

It’s obviously a dream — and since Waltz With Bashir is an animated film, it’s rendered in stark hues of yellow and black that make it seem even more sulphurously stylized — but what does it mean? Why has it taken Folman 25 years to even realize that he has practically no recollection of what was obviously one of the most dramatic periods of his life? He knows, logically, that he must have been present at the infamous 1982 massacre at the Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatila — killings technically carried out by the Lebanese Phalangist militia, but with the aid and tacit approval of the Israeli Defence Forces — but as to what function he played in those events ... well, as Folman says, “That’s not stored in my system.”

Waltz With Bashir follows Folman as he interviews old friends, fellow soldiers, and eyewitnesses to the massacre in an attempt to excavate his memories of that day. It bills itself as an “animated documentary,” but since it mixes in fabricated conversations, dream sequences, and musical montages (many set to Max Richter’s superb score) in with its talking-heads interviews, perhaps it’s more accurate to think of it more as an autobiographical cartoon in the same vein as Persepolis. Whatever you want to call it, it’s a singularly gripping experience — Full Metal Jacket meets Waking Life.

Folman’s investigation into his own amnesiac past (which recalls David Carr’s recent book The Night of the Gun) gives Waltz With Bashir its spine, but its real strength is its evocation of the amoral life of a young soldier — 19-year-old boys, gangly virgins most of them, hitting the beach and immediately shooting at nothing at all; driving a tank down a narrow street, crushing all the parked cars under their treads as they go; blowing up beer bottles, frying eggs on abandoned cars, wandering through empty airports, seemingly with few superior officers in sight. It’s all fun and adventure — until the sniper fire starts raining down on you.

The choice of animation as the medium in which to tell this gritty story seems unlikely, but it works beautifully. First of all, Folman uses animation to maintain full control of the film’s mood, subtly shifting the drawing style from the almost courtroom-sketch look of his present-day interviews to the more cartoonish look of the blackly funny montage of young soldiers inexpertly wielding hugely destructive weaponry (set to a raucous Warren Zevon-learns-Hebrew rock tune). But second, the animated images can be said to stand for the reconstructed, estheticized impressions of past events that Folman has in his head where the real memories should be. The film’s final moments, when reality abruptly crashes onto the screen, are all the more powerful for having been preceded by 80 minutes of artifice.

No, not artifice. That’s not right. What’s the word I’m looking for? Oh yes — art.