Review: Lebanon
The opening image of Lebanon is bright and beautiful and tranquil, and yet strangely startling. The movie opens abruptly with a shot of a vast field of sunflowers under a brilliant sun, an image that lingers much longer than expected.
This image is a stark contrast to the rest of Lebanon, a violent and harrowing film about an Israeli tank crew in the First Lebanon War in 1982. All action in the film, which opens today at the Arbor, takes place inside the tank, a setting that could not be more distant from a sunny field of flowers.
Lebanon's story is compact, spanning only a day or so during the war's opening in June 1982. Amid the Israeli invasion of southern Lebanon, a lone tank and a platoon of paratroopers enter a bombed-out Lebanese town in search of remaining enemy forces. The tank crew expects the mission to be relatively easy -- defeating the assumedly weak resistance and occupying the town for a short time. It quickly turns into a nightmare, however, when they find themselves in a violent situation. The crew's somewhat naïve hopes for a quick victory disappear in a hail of gunfire and explosions, and their mission becomes one of mere survival. To reveal more about the story would spoil much of the astonishing dramatic tension.
Lebanon has been aptly compared to Das Boot, an unforgettable 1981 film about life aboard a German U-boat in World War II. Like Das Boot, Lebanon is entirely claustrophobic, with the tank crew trapped in a dark, hot, filthy world of noise, smoke and horrendous odor. The tank is battle scarred, leaky and barely functional, its floor filled with water and cigarette butts and its every interior surface covered in grime. There is, of course, no bathroom -- and no bathroom breaks, forcing the crew members to relieve themselves in a metal box. After hours in this cramped and disgusting space, the crew is just as grimy.
From within the tank's dank confines, the crew must somehow fight a war while seeing almost none of the war they're fighting. The film's only glimpses of the outside world are via the tank's gun sight, and the view through the crosshairs is relentlessly grim. The images of war are horrific and would be difficult to watch if they weren't so compelling. There are the expected piles of rubble and countless bloody, mangled bodies. But the most memorable images are of the bombings' dazed and sometimes hysterical survivors, who stare glassy eyed at the passing tank or confront the platoon members with hopeless pleas to rescue them and their loved ones from the mayhem.
Lebanon is as brutally powerful as any war film I've seen lately, perfectly capturing the physical and psychological hell of battle. Like the gun-sight images, Lebanon's scope is very limited, but this narrow focus works to the film's advantage. There are scant few details of the larger political forces at work in the Middle East, and these details are muzzy at best, because what matters here are war's hellish effects on ordinary lives. Never mind the relationship between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and leftist Lebanese forces; such alliances make no difference to a screaming mother searching for her five-year-old daughter in a rubble-strewn street.
While Lebanon obviously is a reminder that war is hell, it's also a very human story centering on the tank crew members' relationships; nearly as much conflict occurs inside the tank as outside it. The characters are sketchily drawn, but the film's small cast does a fine job of fleshing them out by focusing on their differing reactions to the stress of war. Itay Tiran is at once reassuringly decisive and creepily unsettling as tank commander Asi, a veteran soldier with shades of Apocalypse Now's maniacal Colonel Kurtz. Oshri Cohen's slightly high-maintenance Herzel just wants to watch the war go by until he finishes his army service in a few weeks. Michael Moshonov is fearful and often hopeless as perhaps the film's most sympathetic character, tank driver Yigal, whose main concern early in the story is ensuring that his mother knows he's still alive and well. And as rookie gunner Shmulik, Yoav Donat is the film's pacifist. Initially afraid to pull the trigger, he becomes less afraid as the story progresses, but no less remorseful.
Like Das Boot, Lebanon is a film you won't soon forget. It may be a small story, but its impact is enormous.