The Gown – student newspaper at Queen's University Belfast.

REVIEW: Lebanon

‘Lebanon’ is the feature film debut of Samuel Maoz, who served in the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon. Based on his own experiences of the first day of the conflict, it took its director 25 years to bring himself to finally complete the script. Watching the film, it becomes exceedingly clear why it took its writer-director so long to complete.

BY MATTHEW MCKERNAN

The film is very much a personal work, extremely well made and deeply effective. With only three exterior shots, the entire film is set inside a cramped and claustrophobic tank in which four Israeli soldiers work, sweat, eat, sleep and urinate. As they move through a war-ravaged land guided by a pitiless commander, tensions rise with the heat temperature and one by one they fall apart.

The film has been compared favourably with Wolfgang Peterson’s ‘Das Boot’. The setting of ‘Lebanon’ is much more confined than Peterson’s submarine, and unveils a much more powerful vision of the horrors of war. Maoz does not shy away from presenting some of the most harrowing images of war ever put on screen. Families, not just enemy soldiers, find themselves in the firing line. Like the film’s terrified gunner, we see the world through the crosshairs of a gun and when the orders come in to fire on the enemy or civilians, we are put right in the gunner’s place. The moral dilemma is suffocating and the film makes it clear that if we were sitting in that gunner’s place we would do the same thing.

The fim’s realistic war sequences are viewed entirely through crosshairs, inescapably reminding video game fans of the ‘Call of Duty’ series. By accident, Maoz raises questions concerning the morality of recreating war scenes as realistically as possible for the purposes of entertainment. In ‘Lebanon’, those dying are family men and women and innocents with little understanding of the war around them, and their deaths are far from swift, clean and inconsequential.

However, far from a vicious splatter-fest, Maoz is more concerned with the mentality of the four men in the tank. The film is a convincing portrait of men in crisis, bickering and clinging to no longer valid orders. The most uncomfortable sequence occurs when a captured enemy soldier, chained inside the tank, screams for help after his captors explain exactly what they plan to do to him. It is a horribly convincing image of a man in panic.

The film recently won the top prize at the Venice Film Festival and looks to be the beginning of a remarkable career for Maoz. Hopefully, unlike Elim Klinov of the equally horrific ‘Come and see’, Moaz has not said all he needs to say.

Tags: film, Gown, Matthew McKernan, Review

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 29th, 2010 at 2:16 pm and is filed under Arts + Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.