Waltz With Bashir

In a year packed with good films, this is surely one of the best. The Observer called it "amazing", and I would too except for the fact that I call lots of things amazing and it would soften its impact. So I shall say it was remarkable, I rarely use that word.



If this film marks a direct in which cinema is going, then I am entirely enthusiastic about the future. Ari Folman recognises the limits of documentary and the drawbacks of fiction and moulds a film which is both, and neither. The layers here are fantastic. Folman, a veteran of the Israel-Lebanon war of the early 80s meets a fellow veteran in a bar who is having a recurring dream about the dogs he shot during the war. Folman realises he himself has no memories of the war, he has blocked it out. The film is his search for his memories.

Sorry, I was supposed to be talking about layers. I'll spell them out. Ari Folman is the director and the protagonist. We see him as a character, as if this were a noir fiction. He doesn't quite say "it all started 20 years ago..." but the implication is there.

Talking to friends and fellow veterans it looks like a fiction, sometimes it sounds like a fiction but we have tell-tell signs of a documentary, those signposts to tell us what register the film is in - each person's name and status comes up on screen, there are talking heads, etc etc. Some of these are real conversations, real interviews, animated. Some are imagined/remembered, voiced by actors, such as Folman's trip to Holland to see his friend Carmi, a millionaire falafel seller. They share joints and talk about the war. These are scenes you'd expect in a fiction. In the credits we discover Carmi's words are voiced by an actor. Folman has a recurring image of rising from the sea and walking through Beirut. This is a dream, or a mirage, and has no place in documentary. Nor do the flashbacks. If a documentary has fictional elements they are "reconstructions"; the technique, style and even film-stock change to tell us what the caption tells us, that this is a reconstruction. None of this appears in Waltz With Bashir.

The effect is a nightmare vision of a brutal war, filled with rich, vivid vignettes - the Israeli soldier who swam home down the coast after being ambushed, a soldier dancing in a street sprayed with sniper-fire, holding an AK47 as if it were a partner (this is where the title comes from). It's personal, as one's experience of war can only be; there is no use in listing statistics, figures: it's distancing.

If you do happen to be distanced by the film, perhaps by the animation, into not quite feeling its full hit, the ending will jolt you upright, remind you what it was all about.