Guilt is all the rage this winter. For things you did, for things you don’t remember doing, for things you remember doing but are running away from so fast that you run smack dab into a 15-year old boy. Then you have sex with him. A lot. You each get naked. A lot. Then you go on a bike ride. Or maybe you walk out of the ocean naked yet wearing a machine gun with a couple pals of yours. All I know is, whatever the hell you did, it wasn’t really your idea, and now you feel like a turd about it. Lot o’ good that’ll do you.
I don’t think there’s ever been a weekend before where I saw two films that seemed different enough on the surface only to end up being about the same things. The Reader seems like a story about love and its effect on the life of one man, or maybe about the price of stubbornness and pride, or maybe about the price of sexing up teenagers…and it is all those things. But it’s really about responsibility. And complicity. And nothing made that more evident than watching Waltz with Bashir.
The only difference is in the way that the guilty parties deal with their, um, guilt. The Reader’s Hanna Schmitz has some mighty big skeletons in her closet. She doesn’t talk about them and it’s clear she doesn’t like to think about them. She lives alone, works with people yet does a solitary job and generally minds her own business. But eventually, those skeletons are brought to the forefront. Though we’re supposed to simultaneously feel bad for her and towards her, it’s hard to feel remotely bad for someone who acts as if they were a third party to their own actions.
Meanwhile, Ari Folman, the star/director/writer/producer of the gorgeous Waltz with Bashir, doesn’t shirk the blame for the actions of his past – he can’t, as he just plain doesn’t remember them. Spurred on by hearing about the recurring dreams of a friend haunted by the ghosts of his past, Folman becomes aware and somewhat shocked that he can remember little of his own participation in the 1982 Lebanon War (and specifically the Sabra and Shatila massacre, where somewhere between a few hundred and a few thousand Palestinian men, women, and children were killed by Christian Phalangists as revenge for the assassination of their leader, Bashir Gemayel).
Like any good documentarian, he sets out on a quest for the answer, talking with friends that lead him to comrades of old that help him unlock the mystery of his past. It’s like The DaVinci Code, only important and without puzzles. And an albino. What we’re left with is a meta-quasi-documentary that might be too depressing and/or too obscure (after all, this is no Holocaust we’re talking about here) were it not for its outstanding presentation.
Though it’s not rotoscoped, the traditional/3-D/Flash-based animation of Waltz has that “moving still life” feel to it, and it’s rich skies and dark tones are the perfect match to the mixture of punk, rock, electronic and local music featured on the soundtrack. With it’s early ’80s-setting (the war scenes, anyhow), Bashir feels, with good reason, like a companion piece to last year’s (slightly superior) Persepolis, mixed with Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. Good company.
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