Shooting and crying, but differently

CANNES - The debate surrounding "Waltz with Bashir," Ari Folman's film, will surely become most vehement when the film, in a competition at the 61st Cannes Film Festival, comes to Israel. Here are some initial impressions following a screening for journalists that was held on Wednesday. On Thursday evening the film had its official premiere.

Without doubt, "Waltz with Bashir" is a very interesting and even an impressive work. It is not free of problems, but these are interesting since they illuminate the twists and turns of the Israeli soul in trying to maintain fairness and integrity while speaking of the individual and the national history shaping the individual and the place in which he is trying to survive.

Folman calls his film "an animated documentary." This is a very daring definition, apparently combining two incompatible extremes of cinematic endeavor: the real at its peak and the imagined at its peak. But isn't every film - feature or documentary - a combination of these two extremes? Isn't Folman, in his decision to make an animated documentary just tugging at this polarity, at the essence of cinema, stretched to the greatest extreme? The film's protagonist is Folman himself. After meeting with a friend who talks about the nightmare he experienced as a soldier in the Lebanon War, Folman decides to deal with his own memories of that war, which are mostly repressed; he does not even remember that he was in Beirut when the Sabra and Chatila massacre took place.

He embarks on a journey to find the memories he has lost and interviews a series of comrades in arms and also Professor Zahava Solomon, a trauma researcher who specialized in coping with repressed or even invented memories, and journalist Ron Ben Yishai.

It is difficult to imagine how Folman's film might have turned out had he not - at the last minute, he claims - chosen to present it in a different format. His decision to turn his work into an animated film, in which all of the characters and all of the events are drawn, was a stroke of brilliancy that rescues the result from several grave dangers.

Even so, in its current form, "Waltz with Bashir" is one of those personal Israeli documentaries that embraces the filmmaker's sufferings, often making them more significant than those of other characters - and often express an off-putting degree of coyness, guilt and self-pity.

One could add "Waltz with Bashir" to the list of Israeli works, cinematic and otherwise, in the category of "shooting and crying." However, what could have been unpleasant had it been presented in an "ordinary" documentary film is rescued from this embarrassment thanks to Folman's choice of using animation.

Compliments are in order for David Polonski, the film's art director, and Yoni Goodman, its animation director. The very impressive animation creates distance between the viewers and the events that the film documents. It enables Folman to include scenes that are remembered by the people who are interviewed in the film; especially impressive are the sequences that deal with Roni Dayyag, a soldier who is abandoned by his fellow soldiers and swims back to the Israeli troops, and also two ostensibly fictitious characters (two of Folman's buddies refused to participate in the film; therefore, they are drawn in a way that is different from the way they really look and their voices are provided by actors Miki Leon and Yehezkel Lazarov). But most important is the sense of alienation that is created by the animation, and this enables the film to gel into a work that deals with the essence of memory itself.

On a broader plane, "Waltz with Bashir" documents psychological collapse and the essence of the post-traumatic stress the protagonist (Folman himself) experiences 20 years after the events that gave rise to it. Folman worked on the film for four years, a time period including the Second Lebanon War, which casts a shadow but is not explicitly mentioned.

Psychological breakdown and battle trauma are not treated easily on the cinema screen. There have already been Israeli films, most of them features, that have tried to do this but without success. Therefore, Folman's success in this is outstanding. "Waltz with Bashir" works beyond the categories of documentary or feature film in a category of its own.

The film's most problematic aspect has to do with its treatment of Sabra and Chatila and with the place of Israeli guilt in that slaughter. Folman's film is both quite harsh and yet evasive about dealing with this guilt head on. Presumably, in future debate here, the entire political spectrum, from right to left, will have what to say about this.

It will also be interesting to see how the audience in Israel will react to such an oddball work. The audience in Cannes followed it tensely; at its end there was applause. One hopes this work, with its considerable achievements and fascinating problems, will garner attention as another building block in Israel's cinematic discourse on history and memory, the individual within the collective and the relationship here between these subjects.