'Lebanon' starts in a beautiful endless sunflower filed, under a scorching sun. It is the last time we see open space and sunlight until the very end of the film.
The rest of the action happens in the close space of a tank, in the first days of Israel's war in Lebanon in 1982. A team of four soldiers is sent in action with a paratroopers company and we soon realize that they are not really heroes stuff. The commanding officer lacks experience and he will crack psychologically under the stress. The driver dreams only to his parents and how to return home, and does not really master his mechanical devices. The gunner never saw action before and he freezes at the first encounter with the enemy causing the death of a paratrooper. The most experienced soldier is the gun loader, he is two weeks before discharge, but we know that he will spend many more months and maybe years in the army, as this war lasted long.
Soon things go wrong. The company officer is the typical army brute, speaking in slogans, hiding information, giving controversial orders. They soon lose completely their sense of orientation and find themselves in enemy controlled territory. The tank is hit, they hardly escape death, and the only meaningful order they get is 'you can improvise'.
The film is a beautiful exercise of cinema and this is the main reason it got the Golden Lion in Venice and may gather more trophies in the future. The whole action happens in the claustrophobic environment of the tank, which somehow resembles the fortification in another Israeli film inspired by the Lebanon war - 'Beaufort' but is more sordid, dirty, unbearable. The outer world is permanently seen through the lens of the targeting optical device, it looks like a target and is indeed a world of destruction, ruins and death, but the balance of forces is not clear, as the the threat comes for the soldiers in the tank from outside, so to some extent they are also a target in a game that can turn deadly at any moment.
In the original aesthetics of the film lies its quality but more was needed to make this film a full and consistent work of cinema. What is missing is a more clear delimitation of the psychology of the characters. The director and the actors intended to show a team of normal young men put in impossible situations, in a place where they do not want to be and where no normal human beings want to be. However, they could not fill appropriately the 90 screen minutes that our heroes spend in the enclosure, and they resorted sometimes to clichés dialog and character stereotypes that do not match the expressiveness of the few good minutes of wonderful camera work.
I liked less 'Lebanon' in comparison with the other two Israeli films made in the previous years about the war. It certainly does not have the novelty of language and genre of 'Waltz with Bashir' and not even the crisp quality of the cinema and characters building in 'Beaufort'. It has a powerful anti-war message, which can be read as not only opposing a specific war but any war that obliges people face impossible situations. The concept and cinema language are original, but characters development does not completely fit the ambitions.
At the end of the film the tank finds somehow its way out of the encirclement. For the first time we see the tank filmed from outside, all over the film we saw only the interior. One of the soldiers rises out in the light of the sun. He finds himself in the sunflower field that we saw in the first sequence of the movie. The cinema exercise is over.
The rest of the action happens in the close space of a tank, in the first days of Israel's war in Lebanon in 1982. A team of four soldiers is sent in action with a paratroopers company and we soon realize that they are not really heroes stuff. The commanding officer lacks experience and he will crack psychologically under the stress. The driver dreams only to his parents and how to return home, and does not really master his mechanical devices. The gunner never saw action before and he freezes at the first encounter with the enemy causing the death of a paratrooper. The most experienced soldier is the gun loader, he is two weeks before discharge, but we know that he will spend many more months and maybe years in the army, as this war lasted long.
Soon things go wrong. The company officer is the typical army brute, speaking in slogans, hiding information, giving controversial orders. They soon lose completely their sense of orientation and find themselves in enemy controlled territory. The tank is hit, they hardly escape death, and the only meaningful order they get is 'you can improvise'.
The film is a beautiful exercise of cinema and this is the main reason it got the Golden Lion in Venice and may gather more trophies in the future. The whole action happens in the claustrophobic environment of the tank, which somehow resembles the fortification in another Israeli film inspired by the Lebanon war - 'Beaufort' but is more sordid, dirty, unbearable. The outer world is permanently seen through the lens of the targeting optical device, it looks like a target and is indeed a world of destruction, ruins and death, but the balance of forces is not clear, as the the threat comes for the soldiers in the tank from outside, so to some extent they are also a target in a game that can turn deadly at any moment.
In the original aesthetics of the film lies its quality but more was needed to make this film a full and consistent work of cinema. What is missing is a more clear delimitation of the psychology of the characters. The director and the actors intended to show a team of normal young men put in impossible situations, in a place where they do not want to be and where no normal human beings want to be. However, they could not fill appropriately the 90 screen minutes that our heroes spend in the enclosure, and they resorted sometimes to clichés dialog and character stereotypes that do not match the expressiveness of the few good minutes of wonderful camera work.
I liked less 'Lebanon' in comparison with the other two Israeli films made in the previous years about the war. It certainly does not have the novelty of language and genre of 'Waltz with Bashir' and not even the crisp quality of the cinema and characters building in 'Beaufort'. It has a powerful anti-war message, which can be read as not only opposing a specific war but any war that obliges people face impossible situations. The concept and cinema language are original, but characters development does not completely fit the ambitions.
At the end of the film the tank finds somehow its way out of the encirclement. For the first time we see the tank filmed from outside, all over the film we saw only the interior. One of the soldiers rises out in the light of the sun. He finds himself in the sunflower field that we saw in the first sequence of the movie. The cinema exercise is over.