Off to fight on the Lebanon front

FILM REVIEW: LEBANON
Reviewed by Don Perlgut
Rating: ***

FROM its opening scene in a field of waving sunflowers, the Israeli movie Lebanon commands attention. This is the first feature film by Tel Aviv-born director Samuel Maoz and tells the story of an Israeli tank crew during an incursion into Lebanon during the 1982 Lebanese war.

We have seen great and harrowing films about Lebanon before, notably Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort (2007) and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008), however, Maoz brings a new perspective to war films: the entire movie is shot within and from the perspective of the tank crew.

In the vein of the recent American film Buried, about a man buried in a coffin in Iraq, could we be seeing a new wave of “claustrophobic” filmmaking?

Lebanon is filmmaking straight from the heart and the stomach. As a 20-year-old, Maoz spent part of the 1982 Lebanon War in a tank and this is his story.

He introduces his film with the poignant words: “On June 6, 1982, at 6.15am, I killed a man for the first time in my life. I did not do so by choice, nor was I ordered to do so. I reacted in an instinctive act of self-defence, an act with no emotional or intellectual motivation, only the basic survival instinct.”

Twenty-five years later, Maoz wrote the first draft of the script of Lebanon, which he describes as “straight from my gut”, with “no intellectual cognition … ”

The idea of the film is breath-taking: a whole war seen primarily through the faces and viewpoints of the four tank operators: Shmulik the gunner (Yoav Donat), who watches much of the action framed through his scope; Assi the commander (Itay Tiran); Herzl the loader (Oshri Cohen); and Yigal the driver (Michael Moshonov).

They have occasional visitors who literally pop in the tank’s top hatch, mostly the paratroop commander Jamil (Zohar Strauss), who assures them that it will be a “cakewalk”, as well as a dead paratrooper’s body and a Syrian prisoner.

Why are the Syrians there? The soldiers have no idea. In fact, they barely know who they are fighting and why. They just want to survive.

Shmulik, terrified in his first shooting encounter, is responsible for firing the tank’s powerful weapons and near the beginning of the film he “chokes”, with disastrous results. Is Shmulik director Maoz’s character stand-in? We are not certain, but it’s my guess he is.

This is war, brutal, harrowing, deeply disturbing, full of death and destruction. The impact on Lebanese civilians is seen in close-up and through the scope (cinematography by Giora Bejach is stunning).

The implications are clear: the village they have entered has been decimated, and innocents have been slaughtered, some by “terrorists” and some inadvertently by the Israelis themselves.

What holds Lebanon back from making a greater emotional impact on the viewer is that we simply do not learn enough about the characters to care sufficiently about them.

The script gives us no “back story”, no parents, lovers, girlfriends or immediate past as a context to know why they are feeling how they do. So while the film will leave you shaken and shocked, these characters will not remain with you long enough.

Lebanon is a visceral experience, not for the faint-hearted or the weak. It is a truly accomplished film, fully deserving of its Golden Lion award at last year’s Venice Film Festival and its 10 nominations at the Israeli film awards, where it won four awards.

Lebanon is being released on December 2.

PHOTO:A scene from the war movie Lebanon.