Lebanon

[pro-bassoonist]

Samuel Maoz's Lebanon (2009) has received a preliminary release date: August 23. Winner of the Golden Lion Award at last year's Venice Film Festival.

PRE-ORDER/Review


Official French site:
http://www.ctvint.fr/pages/fiche.asp?id=3586

Ali Hazzah (Eyeforfilm):

Operation Peace in Galilee - the subject of director Samuel Maoz's feature debut - concerns nearly three-decade old events that Israel's Lebanon generation is only now beginning to resolve (see Waltz With Bashir, and Beaufort). The film, based on Maoz's own experiences of the time, picked up the Golden Lion at the 66th Venice Film Festival.

Lebanon presents the invasion from the hermetic perspective of four young tank crew members who metaphorically lose their bearings. One of the protagonists, the gunner Shmulik (Yoav Donat), is a stand-in for Maoz; there are many takes seen from his perspective, the tank's gun scope, which, years later, would become that of a camera.

A film is, of course, more than just shadows on a screen. When a movie concerns real events within living memory, audiences tend to fill the holes. It is not Maoz's intention to present a comprehensive picture of Israel's '82 war; rather, the film is a disciplined attempt to come to terms with his particular military role, and its psychological aftermath. Thus, much historical information is left out and, for this reason, bloggers and film critics in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Arab world have lambasted Lebanon as being myopically self-involved.

The movie presents a number of standard war movie characters, portrayed here to a large degree as victims of regrettable circumstances (war is hell, and all that), including a domineering field commander (Zohar Strauss), a man with a soft spot in his heart for phosphorus bombs, and the aforementioned four ordinary GI Joes (the nice lads inside the tank), who simply have to fight the necessary fight, even though they really want nothing more than to safely go back home.

Rounding out this cast of characters is a Phalangist collaborator, as well as a captured Syrian soldier. The latter says virtually nothing; at some point, he receives an act of kindness from one of the lads (being allowed to piss in a can), this after being threatened in Arabic by the dodgy turncoat to have his balls cut off, only to finally end up in a rather bad way.

The movie contains one moment of insight, but it appears to be inadvertent. It takes place during one of the few times in this claustrophobic film that the camera ventures out from inside the tank.

An apartment building, where a shootout is taking place, is destroyed. An Arab mother runs out to attempt to find her dead son. As she vainly searches for him, her clothes suddenly go up in flames, and they are partially ripped off by an IDFer, to save her life. The woman ends up wandering around the rubble, in a state of shock, naked from the waist up, traumatised and completely alone amidst the devastation of what once was her home, as Israeli soldiers look on impassively.

It is an extraordinarily moving scene.

Yet when I asked Maoz, during the Q&A that followed the showing of the film at NYFF 09, if this woman was meant to represent anything in particular, he said no, not really, she was just part of what he saw.

Indeed.

Pro-B