20/20 Filmsight - Film Criticism by David O'Connell

Well, after a stream of steadily improving films in the latter days of the 2010 BIFF, my festival finally ended with a severe kick in the nuts yesterday. Lebanon, the Israeli tank film that has won plaudits worldwide, turned out to be a major disappointment.

Lebanon’s party trick is in its telling. Almost everything is seen from the protagonists’ point of view: that is, through the gunsight of their terrifying war machine. On the face of it it’s a clever device -- albeit one that’s been used before -- but you end up left with the sneaking suspicion that it’s just a way of excusing the filmmakers from actually having to get involved in the pesky job of staging and framing their action scenes.

It also gives them the opportunity to indulge in some near-manipulative close-ups, particularly in the early part of the film. As the four tankers take their machine across the border during the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, yellow-belly gunner Shmulik (Yoav Donat) provides us with the visual commentary – in extreme close-up.

Over and over again, he focuses and zooms in on people and objects. It’s like his massive turret is a carelessly swung handy-cam. Obliterated chicken farmers; partner-less backgammon players; hung lamb meat; weeping, dying donkeys (a shot that’s lifted straight from another recent film about the invasion of Lebanon): they all get the macro-treatment. It’s like a nightmare, not because it feels real but because ultimately it doesn’t look real.

Writer-director Samuel Maoz was a gunner in a tank and you have to admire his honesty with what you can only assume is his cinema-self, but Shmulik turns out to be a truly unsympathetic character. Things aren’t much better for the rest of the crew: indecisive commander Assi (Itay Tiran), panicky diver Yigal (Michael Moshonov) and reluctant loader and aspiring iconoclast Hertzel (Oshri Cohen) may all be accurate depictions of real people, but they’re rudimentarily drawn and barely change throughout the film. From the audience’s perspective, it gets pretty tiresome pretty fast.

A little better is the crew’s infantryman commander, Jamil (Zohar Strauss), who climbs into the tank every so often to remind them of their duty. Jamil is hard as nails, but throughout Lebanon’s running time is also distinguished by being the only character that actually receives more than one shade from the filmmakers.

So Maoz hasn’t done a great job with his script, but then he doesn’t really do a fantastic job with his direction either. The interior of the tank is our environment for 85 per cent of the film, but at no stage is the geography of the space properly set out. It means unplanned passengers – such as a captured Syrian (Duda Tassa) – can often go unacknowledged for large tracts of the film, and you’re almost surprised when they pop up again.

Maoz is also steadfast in his refusal to explain the context of the conflict to the viewer. Part of the 1982 Lebanon War’s fascination lies in its complexity – how could such a small conflict be so confusing? It’s a question asked among the young tankers of the film, but when Syrians, Lebanese and Christian Phalangists all wander through the picture, very little of what they do is given any meaning.

Thankfully, for all the tawdry early material, Lebanon does get a little better in its second half. The men are given a clear objective before being plunged into danger. It would work better if you cared about the characters, but at least some degree of tension is built.

Coming to the fore in these scenes is some epic sound design, courtesy of Alex Claude, and Giora Bejach’s suitably claustrophobic internal photography. Of the outside moments, by some margin the best is a RPG attack on the tank – the viewfinder shot, inter-cut with Shmulik’s wide-eyed terror, is pretty special indeed.

My compadres and I did a serious amount of head scratching yesterday after leaving the cinema. We just couldn’t understand how such and ordinary film had garnered such a strong critical response. And it seemed we weren’t alone in our appraisal; a couple of scenes elicited open sniggering from the audience.

If you are in interested in the topic then perhaps see Lebanon for yourself – it has received enough praise internationally to warrant your own opinion. Just be sure to keep your expectations firmly in check.


I say: The most disappointing film of a fairly flat festival. Waltz With Bashir this is not.

See it for: The sound design is certainly impressive, but I took little else of substance from this film.