Waltz With Bashir

It’s difficult, if not downright churlish, to criticise a documentary in which a film-maker attempts to recover his suppressed memories of witnessing the Shabra and Shatilla massacre as a 19-year-old infantry soldier. Especially when the film-maker- Ari Goldman- not only writes and directs, but ‘stars’ in the film as he travels around the world talking to the people who were with him during the 1982 Israeli-Lebanese war, trying to piece together an experience so painful he seems to have become dissociated from it.

As viewers we feel privileged to be allowed to follow Goldman on this intensely personal journey, and there’s plenty to admire about Waltz with Bashir beyond its unflinching honesty. Goldman’s decision to animate his documentary- using a combination of frame-by-frame, computer and rotoscoping animation- gives a real sense of the reality of his experience, as his interviews with old comrades and friends blend seamlessly with hallucinations and memories of war. The animation is at times breathtaking, particularly in the way the characters’ graceful, halting movements seem to capture the beauty under constant threat of violence of war. Max Richter’s score and an eclectic soundtrack enhance the already considerable power of many of the scenes, and cutting to real footage of the aftermath of the massacre brings the film to a moving conclusion.

However, obvious as the decision to end the film here seems in retrospect, when watching the news footage for the first time it’s not at all obvious that Waltz has reached its conclusion. Goldman jumps around so much- from the story of a friend who swam to safety to the young Ari losing his girlfriend; from the party atmosphere on a captured beach to a soldier’s insane ‘waltz’ under fire- that it’s all too easy to get distracted from the central theme of the massacre.

The visual refrain of Ari and his comrades emerging naked from the water and walking through war-torn streets is one of the most beautiful and powerful scenes in the film, and is obviously intended to represent his mind getting closer to a repressed memory. But it appears at such seemingly arbitrary points, and mixed in with so many other memories and hallucinations that there is no real sense of tension as to what they are walking towards; what he will uncover. In his attempt to capture the reality of war, Goldman shows so many different aspects- the anarchy and surrealism; the loneliness and alienation- that he at times loses sight of its horror and barbarism as crystallised in the Shabra and Shatilla massacre.

With its unstinting honesty and hypnotic, hallucinatory insights into Goldman’s memory, Waltz is an unparalleled documentary, but a more focused narrative structure could have made it even more powerful.