Waltz with Bashir

Waltz with Bashir. Just saw the film. The gut of the film is gut-wrenching. Perhaps because of the association so many more Palestineans than Israelis (my roomate and neighbors were Palestinian) I immediately took this film in the political context. But that personal bias only enhances my appreciation of this film and the people who made it.

Tim O'Brian un-peeling his journeys in Vietnam leads to this sense of alienation and loss. Perhaps I've forgotten many aspects from "The things they carried", but "Waltz..." leads you, rather hallucinates you and draws you to face a horrific tragedy that has been suppressed.

The Shatila and Sabra massacres being identified with pictures of Jewish Warsaw ghettos being cleaned by Nazis is meant to make a statement. "Waltz...", (as Ariel Sharon is no more) is a late but necessary movie - not for the world but for the Israelis. The narrator having 'forgotten' and failing to recollect the sequence of events, either willfully or through mental obstructions, reveals a nation trying to survive yet not lose its sense of self-conscious and more importantly humanity. The hidden/suppressed guilt of the documentary film maker is really a cry of a people of a nation who feel they cannot be seen to be weak and crying over a tragedy it was complicit in. Yet, it is a trauma that needs an outlet.

Then the sequences reminiscent of "Apocalypse Now" with cowboy-rock star soldiers was spectacular. How does one explain a war? Do you think that Vietnam's greatest cinematic gift is how it denied the celebration of war, of war heroes and rendered victory parades an exercise in the bizarre? It unburdened world's history and its consciousness from the tales of chivalry, of valiant warriors and their bravery in the battlefields.

Sure, we will still get lots of the old stuff, but post-Vietnam cinema has changed everything. Waltz with Bashir is another brilliant why.

[Response to an email to a friend.]