Arts & Entertainment Israeli Film Stirs An Oscar Buzz Long before Israel's strike against Hamas, Waltz With Bashir had staked its claim as one of the most important films of 2008. Michael Fox Special to the Jewish News 0 n Jan. 3, the National Society of Film Critics named the Israeli film Waltz with Bashir the Best Film of 2008 at its annual meeting in New York. In L.A., the film took the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film on Jan. 11. Can an Oscar be far behind? True, the top pick by the national critics is rarely emulated by the Academy Awards voters, but the buzz in Hollywood is that Waltz may well become the first Israeli film to win an Oscar. (Academy Award nominations were announced today, after this story went to press.) The film combines state-of-the-art animation, an anti-war documentary theme and a psychoanalytical approach to recover the memory of a traumatized Israeli soldier — that of Israeli director Ari Folman, who is the film's central char- acter as a 20-year-old infantryman whose unit spearheaded the Israeli advance into Lebanon in June 1982. The announced goal was to stop incursions and rocket attacks on northern Galilee towns by the Palestine Liberation Organization. Israel's current incursion into the Gaza Strip to eliminate Hamas rocket attacks provides Waltz an added relevance. Folman's experience turns out to encompass some of the most painful moments of what's come to be seen as Israel's Vietnam, notably the massacre of Palestinian civilians by Christian Phalangists in the Sabra and Shatila refu- gee camps. Although the film serves as a savage critique of Israel's military and political leadership — notwithstanding Folman's assertion that he set out to make an autobiographical film, not a political statement — its release at home didn't trigger a re-examination of the war. "The film brings no news in regard to what happened, in terms of facts and responsibility," the bearded 50-ish film- maker says during a recent stop on his marathon international publicity tour. "I didn't want to spend four years of my life dealing with politicians. I kept it on a very personal level, the story of the corn- SS Israeli director Ari Folman's unsentimental voice-over in his animated anti-war film, Waltz With Bashir, drips with a world- weary, distinctly Israeli existentialism. mon soldier. All the other facts in the film, they were all exposed in the Kahan Commission 25 years ago." The film's release in the wake of the debacle of the second Lebanon war may have contributed to its enthusiastic response at home, Folman acknowledges, admitting to some curiosity as to how the film would have been received had it come out prior to the 2006 war. Waltz With Bashir premiered to enor- mous acclaim in May at the Cannes Film Festival and was snapped up for American distribution. Israel's official Oscar submis- sion for Best Foreign Language Film opens Friday, Feb. 6, at the Maple Art Theatre in Bloomfield Township. Not unlike the four sons of the Passover seder, Waltz With Bashir presents veterans with different views of their obligation. The movie is kick-started by an old army buddy of Folman's recounting his recurring nightmare of being chased by 26 dogs. Boaz knows the source — the job he was given during his military service — but he can't stop the dream or his anguish. Boaz's PTSD is disturbing but no more so than Folman's amnesia. Ari remembers nothing of his wartime experience, which is to say he has suppressed everything. But he feels an amorphous responsibil- ity, so he embarks on a kind of detec- tive story, interviewing men he'd served with 25 years earlier. With each strange or ghastly anecdote, and fresh clue, the same question bubbles under the surface: What's better, remembering or forgetting? Ari flies to the Netherlands for a darkly comic visit with his buddy Carmi, a bril- liant aspiring scientist who left Israel after he left the army. Now a wealthy, perpetu- ally stoned entrepreneur, Carmi starkly illustrates Israel's brain drain. Although he's no fool, Carmi plays the part of the simple son — "What has all this to do with me?" — when Ari explains the nature of his quest. He's moved on; why doesn't Ari? If you know about the Christian Phalangists' massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982, you may harbor a dark suspicion where Folman's excavation of the past will lead. If so, Waltz. With Bashir plays like a murder mystery in which you know the victim and possibly the killer, but are anx- ious about the narrator's complicity. The remarkable thing about Waltz With Bashir is that Folman's use of color-satu- rated, often poetic, animation doesn't dis- tance us from the grievous realities of war. He achieves a potent and enthralling kind of surrealism that works as both eye candy and bad trip. While the splendid animation in Pixar movies — notably fluid camera move- ment that mimics live-action films — is designed to entice us into surrendering ourselves to an artificial world, Waltz With Bashir never wants us to lose sight of the real world. This reality, of war and its aftershocks, is continually heightened and immediate. 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