Lebanon [London Film Festival]

Lebanon is the movie I've been waiting for since the Venice Film Festival where it grabbed the main prize. I finally watched it on a DVD in the London Film Festival mediateque as I managed to miss the press screening. At first I was afraid that I wasn't going to experience it completely on a small screen. After watching it, I changed my mind. It was actually a good idea. Stealing the phrase from an Orange commercial: The movie like this is too big for the big screen. Here is why.

It starts in the middle of the war in a tank. You don't really have the time to meet the soldiers, get to know them better. You are thrown into the tank with them and are expected to adjust. And they expect you to stay there for the whole movie. It's very stuffy inside the tank. It's dark, you don't get to see much of the outside. It's a tank after all. Sometimes your mayor comes and gives you orders: "destroy any car coming in our direction", "shoot this guy on the roof together with all his hostages", "devastate the whole village". But you don't really know what you're doing here and neither do your comrades. You are expected to follow the orders but you are not given any explanation. You can't see the whole picture and it's for your own good. There is a chance you are going to die and you are expected to accept that. What you are not expected to do is to ask or show any human emotions. This is war.

Lebanon is an ultimate war movie. There is no plot, there is hardly any dialogue. And it's very real. So real that you feel you're there, so real that you hold your breath and expect the worst to happen. This is the biggest value and the greatest achievement of the film.
It doesn't really say anything new about war, suffering or hope. It's the approach which reminds me of Black Hawk Down, but with the brave Americans replaced with uncertain and scared Israeli soldiers, a tank instead of a helicopter and most of the action missing. And with some poetry added which somehow managed not to look cheap at all after all the miserable things we are forced to experience.
It also reminds me of Waltz with Bashir, another Isreali production about the same war, from a year back. Both movies share the exact same kind of uncertainty and cluelessness. The characters are floating, not walking. They act mechanically and in despair. They don't seem to share any common values. They are lunatics.

After exiting the cinema I had a thought that Lebanon might have just joined the league of the historic war masterpieces like Full Metal Jacked or Apocalypse Now!. I don't think that anymore. I was just overwhelmed by its intensity.
Watch it yourself if you want to experience the war in a raw form, with no heroes, no love stories and no deeper sense. It not "a film everyone ought to see" but it's a huge cinematic achievement, close to a masterpiece, anyway.

Watch the trailer here: