‘Lebanon’ delivers tense tank’s-eye view of war
Thursday, August 19, 2010 | by michael foxIt’s an unusual strategy that Sony Pictures Classics has chosen to open the sweaty, intensely riveting battlefield drama “Lebanon” during the dog days of August. Perhaps the plan is to turn off the air conditioning in theaters, giving moviegoers that much more of a sense of being confined with raw recruits inside a thundering tank.
Samuel Maoz’s harrowing, autobiographical movie begins in pre-dawn quiet on the first day of the Lebanon war in June 1982, then knocks us off our bearings immediately. Instead of the camaraderie and teamwork we expect, the Israeli tank crew is plagued by insubordination, inexperience, inadequate training and impending panic.
Even the down times, when the tank is situated in a reasonably safe spot and awaiting orders, are perfectly calibrated to reverberate with the echoes of what we’ve been through and the promise of more fresh hell straight ahead.
“Lebanon” (opening locally Friday, Aug. 20), won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival last September and Israeli Academy Awards for cinematography, art direction, sound and supporting actor (Zohar Strauss). It lost out for best film and best director to “Ajami,” which became Israel’s official submission for the best foreign language film Oscar.
From the outset, Maoz encourages us to question whether the film is a critique of the Israeli political and military establishment or a universal portrait of the chaos, carnage, confusion and, inevitably, pointless deaths of war. At the same time, this beautifully executed film knows full well that neither viewer nor soldier has time to debate — only to react — while hanging on for dear life. Not until the postmortem, after the lights come up, can a political discussion ensue.
But it’s hard to miss the repeated reference to the phosphorous shell, a weapon that’s not supposed to be used in civilian areas, among the tank’s armaments. Meanwhile, the disembodied and emotionally distant voice of the senior officer on the radio is a reminder (as it was in “Beaufort,” a fine Israeli movie about the same war) of who’s cool and composed and looking at a screen and who’s on the ground taking fire.
Everything about “Lebanon” feels personal, down to the way a crushed soda can and a cigarette look in a reflecting puddle of — well, what is that? Oil? Blood? There’s also the tank driver’s painfully naive request that someone call his parents, in the middle of a full-scale invasion, and tell them he’s all right. It doesn’t get more real, or more human, than that.
As a further wild card, the tank crew is burdened with a captured Syrian fighter. His presence in Lebanon is a mystery, but that pales next to the order over the radio to follow the escape route provided by a couple of Lebanese Christians. The ally doesn’t look any different than the enemy, and how is a young soldier supposed to make sense of that?
That’s the “sense” and surrealism of war, “Lebanon” tells us, over and over, in dozens of ways. This is truly a film that one experiences and, in that regard, it blasts to smithereens all the fake explosions and ersatz thrills proffered by yuk-yuk action films in the last four months.
Perhaps Sony Classics knows what it’s doing, after all, by opening “Lebanon” in the summer.
“Lebanon” opens Friday, Aug. 20 at the Embarcadero Center Cinema in San Francisco, the Shattuck Cinemas in Berkeley and the Smith Rafael Film Center in San Rafael, and Aug. 27 at the Aquarius Twin in Palo Alto and the CineArts @ Pleasant Hill.