Reviews of Lebanon
Displaying all 2 reviews
VIVANTE
7Aug10
The vibrant sunflowers and sky which open and close «Lebanon» are like the Sardinian desert island scene in Antonioni’s «Il deserto rosso». After the cramped, grimy, mechanic darkness of the tank, petrol soaked, it’s startling to see the brimming greens, yellows and blues, all natural, an overturning of the palette. As the viewer walks away from «Red Desert» feeling some of the unpleasant neurosis of Monica Vitti’s character trapped in Ravenna’s industrial landscape, so one walks away from Lebanon feeling, I think, something of the horrific claustrophobia of tank warfare, the deceptively far from secure removal provided by viewfinder and steel casing – similar to what R.C. Sherriff did with trench baracks in «Journey’s End».
Bobby Wise
28Feb10
“Levanon/Lebanon” by Samuel Maoz draws on the director’s experience manning a tank in the first Lebanon war. The genre of the war film is employed here with all of the usual tropes. However, the film also observes a rigorous classical structure featuring a dramatic unity of time and space; we never leave the confines of an Israeli army tank for the entire running time. The only views of the outside world we get during our time in the tank with the soldiers is through the gunner’s scope which relentlessly scans the landscape at various focal lengths, effectively creating the film’s visual narrative exposition. This strategy also evokes early narrative cinema with its peep show-like framing and theatrical mise-en-scene with shallow depth of field. The gunner becomes a surrogate for the film’s director, what he sees a reflexive exercise in cinematic construction. In this sense the film is a direct descendant of Hitchcock’s “Rear Window,” though the director professed to being influenced by Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” when he first came upon the idea to make a war film, or, “anti-war film,” as he called it during his post-screening interview.
If “Lebanon” is a great film it is precisely because it exists as pure cinema. If it is a subpar film it is because it cannot manage to escape many of the cliched trappings of the genre it operates within. If the film exists somewhere in an indefinable middle, it evokes the final shot of the film which takes on a complementary surreal tone: the tank is seen in an exterior long shot, our first escape from an interior view since the opening credit sequence, resting in an immense field of beautiful yellow sunflowers while one of its inhabitants slowly emerges from the hatch to look around, confused. There is no classical conclusion for this anti-war film, which marks the director’s maturity and honesty; comforting, given the fact that this is his debut film, and clearly among the reasons it was recognized with a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
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