Courtesy of Sony Classics
Like many modern war movies, Lebanon is anti-war, showing four young soldiers tragically unprepared for the moral and physical trials of killing. Like some postmodern films, Lebanon manipulates the conventions of its genre, in this instance, skewing point of view so viewers of the film remain trapped in the tank with the Israeli soldiers on the first day of the Lebanon war in 1982, sometimes feeling like stalkers, other times like playing a video game. Our only glimpse of what is happening outside comes through the tank’s suspiciously artful periscope, a gaze controlled by the tank’s driver (Yigal, played by Michael Moshonov) and its gunner Shmulik (Yoav Donat, the lead) that at first winces away from the target, then, scenes later, lingers on a mother searching fruitlessly for her daughter who has disappeared in the tank’s blast.
Samuel Maoz’s film, winner of the 2009 Golden Lion, draws on his first-hand experiences of the war, its making serving as a psychological catharsis for writer and director Maoz. But viewers might find it less so, growing weary of the limited perspective, used here to uneven effect, faltering when opting for poetic close-ups over the more brutal actions of the ongoing battle. The film is best when highlighting the failure of war’s insulation: sexy pinups, inspirational slogans, and the tank itself are destroyed as the battles waging around them draw closer upon these young men. The film opens and closes on a field of sunflowers, first alone in its wildness, but at the close encircling the tank and “no longer wild” as the tank asserts its lasting dominion over man and nature.
