Thursday, March 26, 2009
Waltz with Bashir presents Israeli director Ari Folman’s personal quest to explore his participation in the 1982 Lebanon War, memories of which he cannot remember. Collecting interviews from friends and fellow soldiers, Folman uses highly stylized animation to dramatize their stories.
This hallucinatory take on war succeeds as an exercise in exploratory filmmaking mostly because of the energy that informs the film. The images Folman and his team of animators create are exotic, terrifying and sublime.
However, Waltz with Bashir loses as it gains, with the film’s stirring images overwhelming the simplicity of Folman’s mission. We are approached with the horror of war, but it is impressionistic and diluted by time and memory loss. Nothing feels concrete and instead the film slips into a haunting phantasmagoric freeform, punctuated by Max Richter’s pulsing electronic score, which is not a slight per se, it’s just that this overdrive in tone questions the self-importance of the film (animated documentary), especially when the subject is worthy of a more concrete handling. As a history lesson, Bashir is less successful. But as a record of loss, the film is a brazenly brilliant nightmare through the corroded hallways of memory.
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