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-gunner’s sigh, as seen from inside a tank, is inescapable. as we see much of the film’s 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 doesn’t 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 Folman’s 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 maoz’s 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 tank’s 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 makeup—worthy of clouzot’s Wages of Fear—as well as the constant reverse shots of the gunner’s dilated eyeball after he’s peered outside of the tank at the decimated world beyond. These grounding effects are brief, and maoz’s glass isn’t dark enough to be convincingly menacing—since even the cobweb-like cracks on the gunner’s 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 men—who by now have already spent hours completely rudderless within the film’s subjective timeframe—are 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 it’s too little, too late.