no. 16

There's always one that gets away. The other weekend in a tiny theater near the NYU campus I finally saw Ari Folman's "Waltz with Bashir." After watching such a dazzling work, I regret not finding a place for it on my list of best films of 2008. Part personal essay/documentary, part mind mystery, and all parts unsettling dreaminess, Folman creates something at times perfectly astute and other times dense and difficult to penetrate, but isn't how our memories work? A large portion of the film deals with the Lebanon War, but the politics are inconsequential, especially for what is a bleary-eyed Technicolor swirl of images meant to emphasize the mind jam that is the emotional and mental space of post-combat. To great effect, a questionable and vague memory that was created in the mind of Folman plays out several times throughout the film of him and his buddies slowly rising from the seaside shores of Beirut, naked and armed with shotguns. They emerge to find a beautiful exploding sky, lit up by flares. But did it happen? How could it not happen? Aren't we always a part of the actual memories that we retain or are we able to create memories to repress the things we'd care to forget? Folman really works these ideas out as he probably did in his own mind before committing to film. How else can an audience make sense of a quiet interlude between a giant woman, drifting by a boat full of sailors with one a top her proportionally perfect naked body? That sense of yearning and mental detachment reveals these soldiers to be, dare I say, humans and not quite the killing machines they are conditioned to be. But that process of self-actualization is probably a dream for any soldier, which is as devastating as the film's final non-animated moments.