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An award-winning Israeli war drama, set almost entirely within the confines of a tank, this is a potent, unflinching feature that transcends its setting says Mike McCahill.

Samuel Maoz's Lebanon, 2009's Venice Golden Lion winner, is a combat movie that engages a familiar low-budget conceit - limiting its action to one confined space - before transcending it; as in the submarine drama Das Boot, we're invited to peer inside the war machine, and observe those shell-shocked humans within. It's 1982, and a tank codenamed Rhino rolls into Lebanon on the first morning of the Israeli incursion. Within: an inexperienced crew of young soldiers - and their growing doubts and fears.

Bookending shots of the tank at repose aside, the outside world is observed solely through the vehicle’s viewfinder. The choice might suggest a certain distancing – and Maoz, a former tank gunner, is certainly reflecting on his own past here – yet what we witness is wholly magnified; the viewfinder, in this instance, becomes an analogue for the camera. Panning over and zooming in on the carnage, the viewfinder shows us discarded trinkets, uncomprehending faces, bodies blown apart; a bereaved Madonna is stripped bare after her dress combusts under fire.

These images are as scattered, random and disturbing as repressed memories - live-action equivalents to the animated nightmares of Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir, which similarly found a soldier-turned-director using his first film to declare: this is what I saw. Displaying considerable technical expertise, Maoz proves just as attentive to the telling sounds of battle as to its horrendous sights, from the recurring tinkle of the crew relieving themselves in the nearest available jerry-can to those anonymous screams emerging from somewhere beyond the viewfinder’s remit.

Again, the overwhelming sense is that real and lasting traumas are being dramatised: during a momentary impasse, one senior officer recounts how a lover once held him to her breast and encouraged him to cry his fears
away. "Man is steel, the tank is only iron," runs the legend inscribed into the tank’s interior - the kind of maxim beloved of warmongers everywhere, yet which Maoz goes out of his way to prove deluded nonsense: this potent, unflinching first feature pierces whatever defences you might possess, and gets right under the skin.

 

Mike McCahill on 26th July 2010
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