Film Reviews

Lebanon

• Rating:
• Director: Samuel Moaz.
• Starring: Oshri Cohen, Yoav Donat, Michael Moshonov, Zohar Shtrauss.
• Details: Lebanon/Germany/France/Israel / 93mins (15A).

'Das Tank' is the first thing that will pop into the viewer's mind watching this tense drama. Set entirely in the tight confines of one tank, Lebanon might lack the claustrophobic atmosphere of Wolfgang Peterson's WWII film and it's stance on the war but it succeeds on taking the audience on a personal journey through the opening day of the 1982 Lebanese War. They don't really know what they're doing. Asi (Itay Titan) might be the tank commander but he's struggling to exert his authority over the mouthy loader Herzel (Cohen), driver Yigal (Moshonov) and rookie gunner Shmulik (Donat). As they rumble through the decimated streets of Lebanon searching for rebels/terrorists behind a platoon headed up by the no-nonsense Gamil (Shtrauss), order and discipline inside the tank begins to fall apart. The tank may keep the war at arm's length but the crew are forced to confront it head on when they take on board a captured Syrian soldier... Das Boot might have beaten the style of this war drama to the punch by a good twenty-eight years and it's short of Waltz With Bashir's climatic emotional punch but Lebanon is still gripping stuff. The age-old gimmick of smell-o-vision would be the only thing to enhance the experience of this film, as director Moaz gives the audience first hand experience of the heat, the sweat, the smoke, the noise, the confusion and the fear of being stuck in a metal box for days on end. We - the audience, together with the tank's crew - are only granted sight of the outside world thanks to Shmulik's gun sight and when he pulls the trigger, so do we. Moaz seems to be suggesting that those at home in their comfy armchairs are as guilty as him. This approach puts the audience front-and-centre into the war, but at the same time allows some emotional distance between the carnage and the safety. The balance is perfectly struck. Moaz, in his first feature (he has only the documentary Total Eclipse to his name before this), lays it on thick at times: through the gunner's crosshair Moaz insists on giving us extreme close-ups of the innocent victims of war. Once is enough, twice is too much and three times is silly. But these are fleeting moments. If Lebanon can be taken to task, it can be over its non-attempt at getting to the bottom of the war, but Moaz doesn’t even want to try - he simply wants to tell a story of what it's like being a young man taking part in a war he doesn't understand and in that he succeeds.

Review by Gavin Burke