Waltz with Bashir is a profoundly unsettling film. Perfectly transitioning between a startlingly realistic animated frame and the hallucinatory thought processes of the film's creator, it is both original and powerful, managing a stylistic breakthrough as well as knocking the wind from the viewers gasping lungs with its stark beauty and resonance.
The film follows an aging Israeli film-makers attempts to recollect his experiences in the 1980s Lebanon War, specifically his role in the massacre at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Through psychological examinations and testimonials, done in a documentary format, he slowly begins to realize the horrors he has faced, and the difficulty he will now have in shaking them.
The visuals are magnificent. It is as though the audience is reliving memories with Ari, and is being sucked in by their dream-logic and brutal realities. The opening scene, in which vicious dogs charge, unfeeling, ruthless, to an unknown adversary, is perhaps the most indelible of the entire film, serving to introduce the viewer to the nightmare and never let them leave. The dogs are a representation of war, of human nature, itself--charging, lifeless, to a destination unknown, only thinking about what they will destroy at the end.
Sorry if I sound heavy, but that's the effect the film has. It definitely sticks with you; I can't wait until I can see it again, and sort through the intricacies of the images, the deeper relevance of the psychology, and the historical conflict that they mirror. The massacre, which makes the Israeli soldiers "unwittingly take the place of the Nazis", is a stunning revelation, punctuated by a jump back to reality, out of the dreamworld, where the sins of humanity must once again be faced personally.
The film not only examines the condition and suffering of the Middle-East (made all the more relevant by the recent Hamas conflict), but the suffering of the human condition. The animation serves to enhance the allegorical perspective that the film chooses to take--our memories are shifting, pulsating, figments of time and, possibly, total hallucinations. To escape life's realities, perhaps we invent them, if only to forget the brutalities; however, the saying remains true--we must not forget the mistakes of the past, if we are to avoid them in the future.