Waltz with Bashir
Israel/France/Germany 2008
Director: Ari Folman

The Baader Meinhof Complex
Germany 2008
Starring: Martina Gedeck, Moritz Bleibtreu
Director: Uli Edel

THE conventional description of a “computer-animated drama documentary’ does not do writer-director Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir justice. Imagine a film where the images appear to be made from carved prints, all heavy lines and single tone colours, rendered not by knife and paintbrush but by pixel. Imagine a movie with simulated deep focus, slow, two-dimensional moments that draw attention to the inadequacy of body language or the intrusiveness of a coke bottle in the frame. Imagine a film where a scene is replayed three times and you notice details that escaped you previously, to the extent that you wonder whether they were there on the first or second occasion.

Folman is using cinema to, as the opening title puts it, “recover memories”. In particular, these are memories of his military service on the frontline at the massacres of the Israeli-Lebanon war of 1982, where refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps were gunned down by Christian Phalangist militia following the assassination of Lebanon’s reforming leader, Bashir.

Folman meets a friend who tells him of the 26 dogs that race through the town to the foot of his window, growling, drooling and baying for blood. These dogs represent the

26 killed by Folman’s friend while he is out on a reconnaissance mission more than

20 years ago. His superiors knew he could not shoot a human being. Instead, they ordered him to kill the mutts which warned Palestinian terrorists of approaching Israeli forces. While his friend’s guilt is straightforward, Folman’s memories are more complex. He is in the water with another friend, Carmi, and a third man. They approach the shore. There are flares. Folman wants to know what this recovered moment means.

What follows are highly-stylised vignettes involving military service in the lives of Folman, his friends and acquaintances, exploring sexual fantasies, survival guilt, the madness of war, the randomness of killing and the possibility that memories may be fake. Just as a person might block out a traumatic incident, so they might imagine themselves a witness to history. Folman entertains the theory that he might have wanted to be a participant in bloodshed in order to share the guilt of fellow conscripts. There is an equivalency with the Holocaust.

In one telling scene that sums up the film’s contradictory impulses, Carmi asks Folman not to film his seven-year old son, who is playing with a toy rifle. The inference is that Carmi does not want the boy tainted by the past. Yet the film is about bringing memories back to life for the younger generation. To forget is an obscenity.

We never find out what part Folman played in the massacres. The impression of war given to us by Folman is of the manic adrenaline rush of the desperate impulse to survive masquerading as armed combat. Waltz with Bashir finally gives us documentary evidence of atrocities and those left to mourn. Folman’s film simultaneously pushes cinema forward and makes us aware of the inadequacies of artistic interpretation – no matter how vividly realised they are.

When it opened this year’s Cannes Film Festival, Blindness, adapted from José Saramago’s celebrated novel by Canadian film-maker Don McKellar and directed by Fernando Meirelles of City of God and The Constant Gardener fame, got a rough ride from critics. No opening film at Cannes is expected to be good. After all, its job is supposed to be to set the tone and leave the audience wanting more. Still, Blindness is the sort of bad movie that, to borrow a phrase from the late Pauline Kael, “only a talented director could make”.

Here, the focus is on a group of unnamed individuals stricken with sudden “white blindness” – everything they see is white – who are quarantined in an abandoned hospital. There, order breaks down as the gun-brandishing so-called “King of Ward Three” (Gael Garcia Bernal), with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of ammunition, introduces a barter system for the provisions sent into the hospital that quickly descends into institutionalised rape. The occupants of Ward One, led by an optometrist (Mark Ruffalo) infected by his patient (Yusuke Iseya), fight back after one of the women dies.

The film has two strands – science fiction and social metaphor – which quickly undo each other. It makes no sense that the optometrist’s wife (Julianne Moore) fails to contract the disease. A number of possible explanations are implied – for instance, that she sees through the disease as a form of agnosticism and so is  not receptive to it. None of these are particularly convincing. Accompanying her husband as the only seeing person in the house of the blind, she is contrasted with a scheming, opportunistic blind man (Maury Chaykin) who joins the afflicted and aids the King of Ward Three.

Meirelles is extremely good at creating an atmosphere of anxiety. The film begins with a driver losing his sight who is quickly the target of an opportunistic thief (played by McKellar). Yet in the opening minutes, we are not entirely sure whether the man is a Good Samaritan or villain. He takes the blind driver’s car, but comes back for him to help him up the stairs. What is clear is that blindness fixes the characteristics of those afflicted, so those who cannot see their immorality act without regret.

There are fascinating ideas suggested here, but cinema may not be the best medium to explore them. The last half-hour, simultaneous tense yet tediously drawn out, reveals the inmates of Ward One to be quite selfish (and middle class) as their instinct for self-preservation kicks in. When one of them can suddenly see, you think “Why?” There are moments when it resembles a generic zombie film and Blindness slips into blandness.

Patrick Mulcahy

WITH Downfall and The Lives of Others, Germany has challenged the decades-long hegemony of French fare at British art-houses – although both two titles are a long way from representing the cream or the cutting-edge of the nation’s burgeoning cinematic output. Now we have The Baader Meinhof Complex – “from the makers of Downfall”, the chief “maker” in this instance being producer Bernd Eichinger, who has also co-written the script (based on Stefan Aust’s 1985 non-fiction bestseller of the same title.)

Reportedly the most expensive German production ever mounted, it’s a two-and-a-half-hour chronicle of the Red Army Faction, whose 1970s’ campaign of “direct action” against what they saw as an essentially “fascist” West Germany led them to become internationally renowned and reviled as arguably the first celebrity “terrorists” of the mass-media age. The RAF were invariably labelled by the media as the “Baader Meinhof Gang” – after two of their more high-profile members: Ulrike Meinhof (Martina Gedeck), formerly a famous journalist, and Andreas Baader (Moritz Bleibtreu), a hot-headed car-thief who became the charismatic frontman of the outfit.

But whereas most historians now reckon Meinhof was a relatively marginal figure within the RAF, The Baader Meinhof Complex is, for a large part, her story. Eichinger and director/co-writer Uli Edel trace Meinhof’s transition from respectable family-woman to armed revolutionary, and the film’s first section, pulsatingly evoking the turbulent atmosphere of the late 1960s, is by far the strongest. Once Meinhof semi-impulsively joins the RAF, however, the picture starts to lose its way: the second act is a breathlessly episodic hurtle through the group’s ’70s heyday – scored to period hits in a very familiar, Rock and Roll Years style – and it’s distracting that almost everyone connected with the group looks, acts and dresses like a fashion-model.

This is a slick, incongruously conservative treatment of tricky, still-controversial, incendiary material; veteran Edel’s glossy style harking back to his Hollywood stint (where his output included Madonna’s 1993 “erotic thriller”, Body of Evidence.) And the final hour, in which the key RAF members languish in jail during their lengthy trial, is a real slog. It doesn’t help that the film-makers are so coyly evasive about what exactly happened to the protagonists during their final days. The one consistent plus is Johanna Wokalek, who’s engagingly fiery as key RAF player Gudrun Ensslin, but overall The Baader Meinhof Complex counts as a frustratingly missed opportunity.

Neil Young