Film review by Lyn Davidson
Associate Editor
Heritage Florida Jewish News
[This review originally appeared in the Heritage Florida Jewish News, Oct. 22, 2010.]
You are packed, sweating, with three other men, gripped inside metal walls. In the blackness, only the flickering lights of the instrument panels illuminate the faces near you, but you can smell the others’ fear because it is also yours. You’re rattling up rocky terrain so fast you can hardly see outside through the shaking of your scope. The green of your night vision catches a swathe of banana leaves in the crosshairs as the tank pounds up the incline and slashes through the trees. Your little round window is the only way you have to know there’s a world out there, while the sky and the trees rush up at you from far away and then too close, blurred and dizzying and quick. It’s only after you lurch into a stop that you release the breath you’ve been holding you don’t even know how long.
Israeli director Samuel Maoz’s “Lebanon,” winner of the Golden Lion at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, has been called “’Das Boot’ in a tank” for its intimate, gritty, claustrophobic close-up of a group of fighting men confined. But it’s what we normally call a “war movie” only in the sense that it’s set on the first day of Israel’s 1982 war with Lebanon. Maoz has said that his goal was to create an experience, rather than to follow a conventional plot line. “I wrote ‘Lebanon’ straight from my gut,” he said. “No intellectual cognition charted my path. My memory of the events themselves had become dim and blurred. Scripting conventions such as introductions, character backgrounds and dramatic structure did not concern me. What remained fresh and bleeding was the emotional memory. I wrote what I felt.”
On June 6, 1982, 20-year-old Maoz, a gunner whose only targets until then had been discarded barrels, took his place inside a tank as the IDF rolled into Lebanon to drive out the PLO terrorists whose artillery and mortars had been raining down on the Galilee. “At 6:15 a.m.,” he said, “I killed a man for the first time in my life.”
That bloody, 18-year war and its unintentional destruction of civilians used by the enemy as human shields haunts today’s generation of Israeli filmmakers, like Ari Folman, who directed “Waltz With Bashir.”
By 2006, Maoz saw a new generation of Israelis dying in Lebanon, and decided it was finally time to confront the demons he’d been suppressing for 25 years.
Yoav Donat (in his first role after completing his acting studies) is Shmulik, the “new guy” gunner in the tank. Maoz worked closely with Donat to recreate his own visceral knowledge and experiences within the actor, even forcing him to stay for hours inside a rocking enclosed metal chamber heated almost to the point of being unbearable.
That intense transfer of experience shows in all the performances. For the first part of the film, Donat is the sensitive viewpoint character—the stand-in for Maoz and for us—who simply reacts to the increasing violence of the events overtaking him. Through facial expressions alone, Donat limns Shmulik’s guilt and anguish when his hesitation to obey his first order to open fire gets a paratrooper killed.
Michael Moshonov makes driver Yigal’s childlike cries for his mother cut to our hearts. Itay Tiran is tank commander Assi, whose steady mental deterioration and loss of authority increase the tension among the others. Oshri Cohen is Herztel, the volatile loader who never misses a chance to challenge Assi. Zohar Strauss is Jamil, the commander who sporadically drops into the tank from outside with orders and rebukes that increasingly make no sense. The breakneck pace and staccato dialogue reveal little of the characters’ backstories, but the actors give us their interior worlds through their eyes alone.
Political purists will decry the fact that “Lebanon” throws us into the war with no explanation of the background causes that justified the Israelis’ turning ordinary Lebanese lives into a boiling hell. But the purity of art can’t be held captive to political ends. Maoz’s decision to edit out large stretches of footage that would have better explained the plot is firmly in line with Aristotle’s definition of dramatic catharsis: a cleansing of our emotions through the experience of pity and fear.
Maoz is a master of visual and emotional irony. “Man is steel,” says the inscription written inside the tank. “The tank is only iron.” After a seemingly routine mission to “clean up” an Arab village the Air Force has bombed, the tank is stranded, disabled, inside a travel agency, where posters of the Eiffel Tower, Big Ben and the World Trade Center mock the soldiers’ entrapment by Syrians outside. Their Lebanese Christian ally jauntily greets them in English, all smiles, then mutters in Arabic to the Syrian prisoner in the tank of the exquisite tortures he will inflict on him. Jamil tells them they’re going to have “a walk in the park” until they reach the luxurious “San Tropez” hotel, which might as well be Shangri-La. The men inside the tank hear crackling radio voices talking of “flowers” and “angels” as Shmulik’s scope flits over disjointed glimpses of the dying paratrooper outside whose guts spill onto the ground.
“Lebanon” works on so many levels at once, it’s tempting to parse it the way rabbinic scholars explicate biblical text. Its peshat, or plain meaning, tells a simple story of a boy’s education sentimentale in blood, fire and death. The remez level, that hints in symbols, says war is hell. The derash strives for meaning in showing us that, in the chaos of war, we brush up close against the broken humanity of comrades, enemies, and those caught in-between, and in that place there are no clear-cut answers. Each viewer will have to discover the sod, the hidden, esoteric meaning, for himself or herself, though many will be tortured by the whisper of this simple truth: The body survives the death of the soul’s innocence.
Israeli producer and director Micha Shagrir has said, “It’s hard to think of a heroic war film” made in Israel in the last 40 years. “Lebanon’s” characters are raw and scared and increasingly untethered. Likewise, at first it feels surreal to call “Lebanon” a “beautiful” film after its unrelenting emotional rape of the viewer. But, even aside from Giora Bejach’s painstakingly sculpted cinematography worthy of Caravaggio, the film gives us beauty grounded in truth.
During the early days of filming, Maoz developed an excruciating infection in his foot, and had to be knocked out with painkillers. Then five little pieces of shrapnel, his remaining souvenirs of 1982, began to work their way through his flesh to the outside, and he was healed.
“Lebanon” (2009, 94 minutes, in Hebrew, Arabic, French and English, with English subtitles) is written and directed by Samuel Maoz, and is a Sony Pictures Classics release. Rated R. It runs Friday, Oct. 22 through Thursday, Oct. 28 at the Enzian Theater, 1300 S. Orlando Ave. in Maitland. For tickets and show times, visit www.enzian.org or call 407-629-0054.
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