True North

BY J . HOBERMAN

Lebanon, written and directed by Samuel Maoz, is not just the year’s most impressive first feature, but also the strongest new movie of any kind I’ve seen in 2010. Actually, Lebanon hardly seems like a debut, perhaps because it’s based on a scenario Maoz had been replaying in his head for nearly thirty years.

It’s evident that the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Israel’s fifth and least defensible war, has had a remarkable re-emergence in the nation’s film industry. Like Ari Folman’s groundbreaking, animated Waltz With Bashir before it, Lebanon is a film by a traumatized veteran. But where Waltz With Bashir is mainly concerned with the recollection of that trauma, Lebanon is predicated on restaging the traumatic event. Set over the course of a 24-hour period, entirely inside an Israeli tank heading north on the war’s first day, it is at once political allegory and existential combat movie.

Blunt, clamorous and harrowing, Lebanon is also a formalist tour deforce. As the Israeli soldiers never leave their tank, code-named Rhino, the movie is necessarily shot mainly in close-up and, except for the very end, all exteriors are scanned through the crosshairs of the tank’s bombsight. The outside world is heard through the tank’s steel plating or via crackling radio transmissions from distant headquarters. Individuals — a Syrian captive, a dying Israeli soldier and, most often, the battle-hardened platoon leader, Jamil — are intermittently lowered into, or lower themselves into, this moving dungeon. But for the four men inside, there is no escape.

The concept is unrelenting, but Maoz does take a few liberties in the service of his overall aesthetic strategy. Civilians occasionally stare directly into the bombsight; mayhem and casualties appear in fragmenting close-up. Still, this pragmatic stylization is invariably trumped by the emphasis on physical discomfort, constant stress and unthinking panic.

There is no space for anything but the present moment inside the tank. The men’s lack of training — or, more likely, its irrelevance — is made evident early, when the tank’s increasingly befuddled commander argues with his high-strung childhood buddy about whose job is more crucial and whose turn it is to stand watch. (That the commander is the stupidest member of the squad comes with the territory.) The tank’s driver responds negatively to pressure while the newly assigned gunner, Shmulik (Yoav Donat), named for the fi lmmaker, proves unable to fire at a living target.

Shmulik’s paralysis results in at least one Israeli casualty (and this unnamed corpse becomes, for a time, the fifth inhabitant of the tank). Of course when Shmulik does, after much shaking, manage to squeeze the trigger next time, the results are appalling — though we will soon see worse, always through his eyes. The Israelis inflict brutal collateral damage on Lebanese civilians that is all the more appalling as a factor of their own fear.

For all its international accolades, Lebanon’s domestic reception has apparently been mixed. (Unlike Waltz With Bashir and Joseph Cedar’s Beaufort, also about the 1982 war, it did not win Israel’s equivalent of the Oscar.) Conservative commentators saw the movie as bad for morale; on the left, Lebanon has been criticized for identifying with Israeli soldiers and objectifying their Arab victims. But what does this mean?The Lebanese civilians are subject to far more gruesome suffering than the soldiers, while, in his justified hysteria, the Syrian POW inspires at least as much empathy as his Israeli captors. What Lebanon does not do is pretend to share any perspective other than that of Shmulik and his comrades.

Less “agonized and crying” than confined, confused,and utterly self-absorbed, the soldiers in Rhino are unwilling conscripts yearning for normality, ignorant of their enemy, misled by their superiors and totally fixated on personal survival. Lebanon may be the movie’s title, but, blindly plowing through everything in its path, the beleaguered tank is Israel.

Mesrine Takes a Hit

BY N ICOLAS RAPOLD

The two-part tale of French gangstershowman Jacques Mesrine is as densely packed and serially rambling as a welltrafficked Wikipedia entry. Director Jean- François Richet, who whipped up not-bad mayhem in his Assault on Precinct 13 remake, devotes so much time to tallying his subject’s career milestones and highlights — all of them, it seems — that any insight into the supercriminal falls by the wayside. Mesrine’s jaw-dropping record of fl amboyant crimes and repeat prison breaks would seem to guarantee an exciting portrait of this Gallic force of nature, but Richet proves maddeningly loath to edit his material, and his charismatic star, Vincent Cassel, does not delve deep into the character.

Named Killer Instinct in homage to one of Mesrine’s books, Part One opens with Cassel and fi lm in ’70s drag (’stache, split screens) and previews the gangster’s deadly ambush by cops in an unmarked truck before returning to his beginnings. Mesrine’s army tour, torturing prisoners in Algeria, plants a seed of violence, and his bafflingly staid Clichy family is an affront to his masculinity. Dad secures him a legit job, but he gets laid off and doesn’t protest. Soon swaggering into criminal gigs with mobster Guido (Gérard Depardieu, at full girth), he fl aunts his brutality to an Arab pimp and a bar punk. Cassel’s rough-hewn prettiness and glimmers of gleeful sadism suit the restless young Mesrine — at this point, not a national phenomenon.

After a detour for Mesrine’s violent marriage to an innocent Spaniard (spacey Elena Anaya), Part One also establishes Richet’s wearisome approach. His daisy chain of capers and hideouts, with no feel for which events to dwell on, suggests an impatience with basic storytelling: We miss what draws Mesrine to his female accomplice in a kidnapping, while his agonies at the hands of guards in a high-security Quebec prison are drawn out beyond even polemical purposes. No small problem, too, is that the film yields only a rudimentary feel for what it was like to live in France or Canada in the ’60s and ’70s if you weren’t a gangster in a movie. How can you get a sense of a folk hero or media obsession without context?

Part Two (which opens next week) dives into the ’70s and sees Mesrine notching up another prison escape, cycling through disguises, and ratcheting up his media provocations. A couple of new actors come aboard: Mathieu Amalric, as his co-fugitive through farmhouse and roadblock, stares daggers, seemingly waiting for the movie to end; Ludivine Sagnier struts as his horny, devoted moll, including during a brief but interminable yay-we’re-rich montage.

Mesrine’s promised end in November 1979 arrives as history recorded it, but by that time, you’re hoping the next vogue in biopics is the short film.