Vision of War
Lebanon
Directed by Samuel Maoz
At Lincoln Plaza & Landmark cinemas
Runtime: 92 min.
The ponderous mechanical whirring in the film Lebanon that accompanies the camera-as-gunners sigh, as seen from inside a tank, is inescapable. as we see much of the films events through this peephole-sized lens, the persistent noise it generates is one of a handful of ways writer/director samuel maoz strives to remind us that his film is grounded in the muck and the blood and the grease of real-life events (maoz wbased the screenplay on his own experiences as a 20-year-old soldier in the 1982 lebanon War). he doesnt get much farther than that in dirtying up his film, however, since he prefers the clarity of emotionally distant images with deceptive coherence that is only gained through retroactive contemplation.
Which is odd since the israeli film is ostensibly being distributed in the united states because of the success of ari Folmans Waltz with Bashir, which also takes place during the lebanon War. The key difference between the two films is that Waltz with Bashir, an animated feature, was a playful interrogation of the deceptive and surreal nature of veterans memories, while Lebanon supplies a series of horrifying episodes without pausing to interrogate their meaning.
The most immediate sign of maozs conflicted tendency toward prettying up his unclean war story is the way that he films the interior of the tank in which his small cadre of israeli soldiers is stuck. The tanks interior has no clear dimensions, filmed as if it were a stretch limo with room in the back for a fridge, TV, syrian p.o.W. and more. The only convincing signs that the group is cramped, tired and dehydrated comes from their increasingly greasy makeupworthy of clouzots Wages of Fearas well as the constant reverse shots of the gunners dilated eyeball after hes peered outside of the tank at the decimated world beyond. These grounding effects are brief, and maozs glass isnt dark enough to be convincingly menacingsince even the cobweb-like cracks on the gunners lens do nothing to diminish its uncannily crisp view.
These little touches are omnipresent reminders that the events the soldiers are watching have been collected and reforged into a singular, coherent narrative. Though the terror that infects the israelis comes from their inability to know what comes next or whose orders to follow, the film, both aesthetically and narratively, is just too composed to affect us with any kind of immediate tension.
The only time Lebanon is convincingly grungy is when the tank is stranded and the menwho by now have already spent hours completely rudderless within the films subjective timeframeare being led into what looks like an ambush in spite of themselves. at this point maoz batters the viewer with a battery of shaky-cam closeups, but its too little, too late.