Waltz With Bashir ***

Yesterday, after coming home from swimming at the Jan Guilini pool in Bruges and reading the newspaper and drinking coffee at the local Pain Quotidien, I found out, to my great dismay, that my Telenet Digicorder apparatus hadn't recorded the Denver Nuggets / LA Lakers game on Prime Sport - the sole Belgian channel that broadcasts NBA games.

Our (my housemate Jerre and me) two-week tryout subscription to the digital channel had expired, so that was kind of a bummer.

I had to look for an alternative, and scanning through the recordings on the Digicorder, I stumbled upon 'Waltz With Bashir' - a film that I had meant to watch for a long time; I just didn't get to it.

Probably because it looked like a risky film: an animation pic about mass slaughter in Lebanese refugee camps at the beginning of the 80's? That kind of movie can make or break your evening.

Well yesterday, although I was deeply moved by it's shocking ways, 'Waltz With Bashir' made my afternoon. It's not a movie you must watch to feel happy: it's themes are loss of innocence, losing your loved ones and the fact that you can't escape your past - you can try to forget but the memories will haunt you in your dreams.

That's exactly how the film kicks off: Israeli director Ari Folman keeps having this dream about 26 dogs chasing him. There are always 26 of them, and he doesn't understand why this nightmare deprives him of his sleep night in, night out.

The recurring dream may stem from his experiences as a soldier in the First Lebanon War in 1982, when Israeli forces invaded Lebanon to eradicate the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) of Yasser Arafat (remember him?). Apparently, Folman had pushed away the memories to the awful things he saw to that extent that they had been practically erased.

In 'Waltz With Bashir', he attempts to reconstruct what happened to him by interviewing his fellow privates, who had been at his side during battle.

Not only is the film beautifully made (each frame is hand-crafted and not rotoscoped like they did with 'A Scanner Darkly'), scored with catchy contemporary music (such as 'Enola Gay' performed by OMD); it also touches on deep-human subjects which will leave even the most arduent cynist catching his breath.

The images are very atmospheric, bathed in deep-brown and fresh-green, and they radiate a constant feeling of threat.

The film touches on the very sensitive topic which is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but still manages to strike a thoughtful tone, without picking sides too much (which is a feat in itself). In the end, 'Waltz With Bashir' shows the agony of war and how people, who have no quarry with anybody, end up in terrible situations. It shows how they try to stay human in a world filled with death and destruction.

Especially the final act, which focuses on the massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, left a deep impression on me. The atrocities, committed by the Christian Phalangist death squadrons, are shown in a veiled way - though the last images; real news images which were made days after the bloodbath took place, leave no doubts that this was one of mankind's darkest hours.

(Normally I'd be at the demonstration in Brussels today, to protest against the fact that Belgium still - 224 days and counting; we're headed to an world record - has no government, but after seeing the images of the mangled-up bodies at Sabra and Shatila I just thought to myself 'Why even bother. I'm not gonna spend my time giving a signal to those no-good politicians that they just have to do their jobs and get on with it'.)

After seeing 'Waltz With Bashir', everything seems trivial. The movie makes you think, and that's probably one of it's most important merits. We should never forget what happened out there, back in 1982.