Film review: Lebanon

Director Samuel Maoz
With Yoav Donat and Oshri Cohen
Released 14 May

No film can approximate the genuine horrors of fighting in a war—if it did, none of us would be masochistic enough to watch it—but Lebanon brings us closer to a soldier's experiences than any war movie ever made, mainly because the soldiers in question are, in some respects, much like cinema-goers: they're sitting in darkness and watching carnage on a screen.

The winner of the Golden Lion at 2009's Venice Film Festival, Samuel Maoz's debut as a writer-director doesn't try to tell an intricate story or to fill in any political context, but simply to recreate some of the nerve-racking sensations which bombarded Maoz himself when he was an Israeli tank gunner in the Lebanon war in 1982.

Aside from a shot at the beginning, and two more at the end, the whole film is set on board a tank—a hot, grimy, metal box shared by four scared and under-trained 20-year-olds. The only view we get of the outside world is the one that the gunner has, so while we see some of the streets that the tank passes through, and some of the civilians who shrink away from it, they always have crosshairs imposed on them.

The first shock is the ear-pummelling volume of the caterpillar tracks as the tank rumbles towards its destination. From then on we're left in no doubt as to how relentlessly unpleasant and stressful it is to be crammed into a vehicle that looks like a camper van which has been at the bottom of the sea for a year or two.

Between the dripping oil, the sweat, and the tin can that's passed around when the men need to relieve themselves, it makes you grateful that James Cameron or George Lucas hasn't yet pioneered some way of letting us smell what's happening on screen as well as seeing and hearing it. And that's even before the tank's four occupants have to make room for a bloody corpse and a terrified prisoner.

Lebanon never lets up on us. Its traumatic events are all squeezed into one day—the first day of the 1982 war—and it keeps battering us with shock after shock without any flashbacks or interludes for us to catch our breath. We may not learn much about the characters as individuals, but we certainly get a taste of how disorientated and trapped they feel and, despite their weaponry, how powerless.

Like the audience members once the lights in the cinema have gone down, the soldiers have no choice but to go where someone else wants them to go, and see what someone else wants them to see.

Nicholas Barber