It’s an unusual strategy that Sony Pictures Classics has chosen, opening the sweaty, intensely riveting battlefield drama “Lebanon” during the dog days of August. Perhaps they’re planning to turn off the air conditioning in theaters, giving moviegoers that much more of a sense of being confined with raw recruits in 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.
“Lebanon” isn’t so much claustrophobic —although we’re in that infernal tank for the entire movie with the lone exception of the opening and closing shots — as relentless, thrusting us into one taut, fraught situation after another. 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” 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 to “Ajami” for best film and best director, which thus 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, 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 last days of the same war) of who’s cool and composed and looking at a screen and who’s on the ground taking fire.
However, 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, exactly? Oil? Hydraulic fluid? Or blood? There’s also the tank driver’s painfully naïve request that somebody 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 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 Phalangists (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 big and small 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, opening “Lebanon” at the end of the summer.
“Lebanon” opens Aug. 27 at the Ken Cinema, 4061 Adams Ave.,
San Diego. For show times, call (619) 819-0236.
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“Lebanon” director belatedly confronts memories of war
Even if one did not know going in that Samuel Maoz’s “Lebanon” was based on his own chaotic, harrowing experience inside a tank in 1982, the attention to detail clearly conveys first-hand knowledge.
By the last reel, the emotional wounds that Maoz was unable to confront and depict onscreen for 25 years are just as palpable. What we can’t see, or fully extrapolate, is his pre-war mindset and post-war shock.
“I can remember my teacher, in the class with the number on her arm, shouting hysterically that we need to fight for our country and we need to die for it if necessary, because everybody wants to terminate us,” Maoz recalls. “I didn’t feel that everybody wants to terminate me. All that was in my head when I was 18 was the Tel Aviv beach and girls. But in a way we were brainwashed.”
Maoz, whose mother is a Holocaust survivor, can’t forget the disorientation and alienation he felt when he returned from Lebanon.
“To come back from war in the beginning of the ‘80s with your two hands, two legs, 10 fingers, without any burn marks on your skin and to complain that you had problems inside you, it was almost unforgivable,” he said. “They told us, ‘Say thank you that you are alive. We were in the camps.’ I remember that we hated the camps less because of what happened there, but more because they used them against us all the time. It was so strong that even now when I’m talking, and after talking [about the movie] for six, seven months, I still feel like I’m a bad boy.”
The 48-year-old Maoz has been continuously in the limelight, with even Hollywood pursuing him, since “Lebanon” won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival last fall. In an interview at a Nob Hill hotel during his May visit to the San Francisco International Film Festival, the tall, lanky director explained how conflict defines each generation of Israelis — and vice versa.
“Our parents, our teachers, many of them came from Europe, and when they had their wars they thought that this was their only choice,” Maoz says. “They thought that everybody wanted to terminate them, so they had all the motivation that someone needs. And they won, against all [odds]. When my generation had its war, the war was so-so. We didn’t win, but we didn’t lose; we just made a total mess.”
A quarter of a century later, the attitude of Israeli youth has evolved dramatically, he observes without judgment.
“When the new generation — the YouTube, the iPhone, the global generation — had their war in 2006 with the best army [in terms of] technology and equipment, they lost because they don’t have any more motivation to fight. They feel a bit that they are fighting for their parents’ ideas, [but] it’s an Internet world, and they can see normal life everywhere, and they also want normal life, without fear.”
Maoz relates that some older Israelis worry that recent homegrown movies that expose the cost and pointlessness of war, notably “Lebanon,” “Beaufort” and “Waltz With Bashir,” will dissuade teenagers from going into the army. But younger Israelis are demanding the truth, he says, even as their positive reactions to “Lebanon” suggest they respond to it as a personal, rather than a political, film.
“Every antiwar film is in a way a politically correct film,” Maoz asserts, “because even if you want to change people’s opinions or way of thought, you can’t do it just by talking to their heads. If ‘Lebanon’ speaks to one mother’s heart, that is more important than to please 100 intellectual journalists sitting in Europe and expecting me to say the right slogans. And you know what? In the end, this is realpolitik. Realpolitik is not slogans. Realpolitik is trying to achieve a kind of progress.”
