Film Review: Lebanon

Published on Thursday 13 May 2010 19:07

LEBANON (15) **** DIRECTED BY: SAMUEL MAOZ STARRING: YOAV DONAT, ITAY TIRAN, OSHRI COHEN, MCHAEL MOSHONOV

LIKE the similarly innovative Waltz with Bashir, Lebanon offers up a damning critique of the 1982 Lebanon war based on the first-hand experiences of its director.

Unlike Ari Folman's animated documentary, however, Israeli filmmaker Samuel Maoz has chosen to make a flat-out combat movie, albeit one intensified by a strict formalistic approach to its story.

That story takes place entirely within the confines of a tank during the first 24 hours of the Israeli incursion into southern Lebanon and follows the crew of naive grunts as they're forced to make life-or-death decisions that have devastating consequences for themselves and others. A reluctance to shoot up a genuine target, for instance, results in soldier deaths, while an under-pressure attack on a tenement building results in heartbreaking scenes of a mother searching for her missing child.

Maoz prefers short, sharp and shocking character point-of-view shots over lingering war-porn carnage, and he uses the limited physical space of the film's setting to cracking effect, keying us into the frazzled headspace of his young protagonists as they find themselves in the midst of a situation they don't really understand and are ill-equipped to deal with both psychologically and technically. Think of it as Das Boot in a tank.