When a tango just won't do ...

Some movies leave us speechless. Some movies just leave us. They silently float from the screen in pieces until nothing’s left but emptiness.

Ten years ago I was working as a projectionist at a movie theater. After a shift I sat in on the late showing of Robert Zemeckis’ Contact, which ends on this contemplative note, silent and soothing. The camera panned up and we were looking at the stars with only our thoughts and nothing else, and then the screen faded to black. Everyone just sat in the theater. No one moved. No one spoke. In the hallway, you could have heard the electrons spinning on the head of a pin as people filed out while reaching into their souls for answers to the film.

I’ve seen many good movies since then, but none that had the same effect. None until Waltz With Bashir, a film that ends with a punch to the gut, a gasping horror. And then silence. Spoiling the ending any further would be criminal, so I’ll zip it up there.

Waltz With Bashir is a war story made even more graphic and — irony be damned — real through its medium of choice: animation. It’s animated in the rotoscope style, which involves drawing or painting over live-action movement captured on film. It also comes from Israel, so the language spoken is primarily Hebrew. All totaled up, this is the best Israeli rotoscoped war movie in Hebrew you will ever see; not to mention, one of the most important foreign films ever made.

Bashir, which is somewhat autobiographical, is written, directed and produced by former Israeli soldier Ari Folman, whose story provides a general outline for the film. He also voices himself, a soldier trying to shed light on a recurring dream that may be his last memory of a massacre in Lebanon.

It begins with a different dream: A man is plagued by 26 savage dogs in his sleep. He shares the dream over a beer with a friend he served with in the military. “How do you know there was 26, and not 30?” the friend asks. The man, recounting a great pain, explains: As a sniper during the 1982 war in Lebanon he was afraid to shoot people, so his commanders ordered him to shoot dogs that gathered on the edges of towns. He remembered each and every dog, all 26 of them. And now they haunt him while he sleeps.

The film is not about the dog sniper, whose story provides the setup for Bashir’s colorful style and tone, but about the friend, Ari, who questions why he doesn’t remember his own war experiences in Beirut. Waltz With Bashir, very much like the culturally significant Slumdog Millionaire in its hyper-stylized construction and use of flashbacks, is Ari’s interviews of those he served with. The interviews are quiet and solemn, almost journalistic, but the flashbacks they spawn are high-energy rock-'n'-rolla, indicitive of the intensity of war and its waging. Ari hopes to find someone who can interpret his own dream, in which he’s on a beach near a city as flares float down from the sky.

Like Apocalypse Now before it, Bashir is war amped up to a surreal level. The images we see could be from dreams — maybe some really are dreams — but the movie presents them as reality: an AK-47 electric guitar, a soldier frying an egg on the hood of a bombed-out car, a convertible with balloon streamers in a column of tanks, a soldier waltzing in a street as he returns machine gun fire. The film also employs trick photography to tell its story: an RPG firing at slow motion, commuters in time-lapse, various color effects, silhouettes, bleached-out landscapes. These things are real, if only in the minds of the people who experienced them.

But an early scene in the movie questions even this logic. We’re told that a researcher showed 10 photos to to people from their childhoods. One of the 10 is fake — fabricated to look like the person was at a carnival. For all 10 photos, including the fake, most people could identify the memory and provide a story to go with it. The conclusion he makes is that memory is not real, just our perception of memory — “Memory is dynamic; it’s alive,” he says. The scene, which tells us to question what we see in a film based entirely on memory, ends deceptively with a man talking in a kitchen and behind him is a window that looks out over, of all things, a carnival. Is the carnival in the background itself a skewed memory? Was it used in the discussion because it was an available example right out the window? The movie holds its secret, including its last big one, very close.

Bashir is also a satire on war, especially war in the Middle East, where innocent life is extinguished more out of carelessness than out of hatred. In an early scene, soldiers are ordered to shoot, so they do … into the darkness at nothing — it’s amazing they had enough ammo for more than about 15 minutes. In another scene, a Mercedes speeds down a road and Israeli soldiers blow up entire neighborhoods around it without so much as denting a fender. A sniper aims for the driver and shoots, but the bullet passes through the front windows and kills a man on a camel who happened to be passing by. Jets strafe and miss, and artillery rounds sail hundreds of yards too far. By the time the car exits the scene, all of Beirut is crumbling. The scene is made more sinister when it’s revealed the commander who gave the order to destroy the car plucked the command from a random scene in a porno he was watching. Suddenly Kurtz doesn’t seem so nutty.

What it all leads up to is a revelation: Ari was witness to the Sabra and Shatila massacres of West Beirut, where Lebanese Christian Phalangists were given access to Palestinian refugee camps to kill thousands of men, women and children. “You have become your own Nazi,” someone tells Ari, whose role was not murderer but casual observer. The film ends as his memories flood over him, washing away his innocence but not his shame. These massacres were real, and Waltz With Bashir is Ari Folman’s admission of his role. And his apology.

Note: Waltz With Bashir was released in other markets in December and is therefore eligible for this March’s Academy Awards. Had it been screened in Arizona in time, it would have ended up very high on my list of best films from 2008.