Film on the Square
Lebanon

Monday 26th October Vue 6
Tuesday 27th October Vue 6

In Kill Bill 2, I recall the scene with The Bride buried six foot under to be very uncomfortable and disturbing that today I often skip the scene, so I wondered how I would cope with Samuel Maoz’s debut feature film, which recently won the Golden Bear award at the Venice Film Festival. Set during the 1982 Lebanon war, Lebanon, evoking Wolfgang Patersen’s Das Boot, limits nearly all the action within the confines of an army tank, with the gun’s lens providing a glimpse into the outside. Opening to a sea of limp sunflowers in an open field, this is the gentle calm before the ensuing storm.

The tank is controlled by a mismatched crew consisting of a commanding officer who cannot command the respect of his team and is regularly humiliated, a driver whose sole wish is for his mother to know of his safety, a shooter who cannot shoot and an insubordinate shell-loader. Four ordinary young men forced together in extraordinary circumstances, and when the war starts their petulant squabbling gives way to confusion, stark fear and pure distressing agony.

The wet tank floor, the lumbering mechanical screeching, the goo dripping from a busted control panel as if the tank itself were bleeding blood, Maoz obsessive fixation with the tank’s physical confinement so impede your senses that you could almost smell the nauseous intermingling of urine and gas lingering in the restricted air. The dank almost noxious tank is foremost a candid, physical metaphor for the characters’ frayed mentality and psychological decline as their supposedly routine mission is threatened by a surprise enemy attack. Although Maoz successfully uses the tank to illustrates the overwhelming strain and anxiety, the four-man crew lacked any profound individual characterisation to warrant any genuine interest from the audience.

The only contact with the outside are barked down the static radio phone, fleeting visits from the operating commander and the sinister phalangist and, primarily, views through the gun’s len. The purpose of this aesthetic one assumes is to express something visceral about the horrors of war for both civilians and soldiers alike, however, this equally fails to achieve its purpose as the accusatory stares and frequency of this forced motif simply doesn’t achieve its emotional depth.

I watched Lebanon a few days ago and I have to largely depend on my notes to recall anything from the film. It’s win at Venice seems almost unjustifiable as there is nothing remotely memorable, except for the shooter’s anecdote about an orgasm he enjoyed on the day of his death, which drew laughs from the audience. But even this and the individual anecdotes from the other crew members were all but a little too late, and rather clumsily juxtaposed after a chaotic scene with the crew fearing an impending death. Maoz’s film simply doesn’t add a new dimension to films about the Middle East wars, or anything on warfare generally. As one critic I overheard state during the credits, ‘So life inside a tank is a bit shaky and war is shit. I could have got that from Sky News’. Coarse, but precise.