Waltz With Bashir
2008 (Israel / France / Germany)
Director: Ari Folman
Ari Folman’s troubled, magnificent Waltz with Bashir embraces a style/genre mating guaranteed to shake up cinematic expectations: the animated documentary. Wrestling with fragmentary memories of his days in the IDF during the 1982 Lebanon War–especially an unmoored, hallucinatory recollection involving flare-illuminated skinny-dipping–Folman interviews former comrades-in-arms and others who were involved in the conflict. The notorious massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila looms over the proceedings, and the film lurches with a swelling dread towards Folman’s anguished understanding of the events and his own culpability. Bashir’s visuals are stunning, and the film’s sharp contrasts in color and motion serve to deftly highlight its wickedly rendered mood and sobering themes. As in the most powerful, personal examinations of horror, it’s the details that stick: a soldier mopping gore from the inside of his tank, an RPG screaming in agonizing slow-motion through a fruit grove, a journalist walking slowly and unconcernedly through a firefight. Folman tackles the timeless concerns of warfare, particularly its sheer uncanniness, with a thematic discipline that provokes while never seeming obligatory. Bashir’s primary fascination is memory’s role in tallying guilt and digesting the seemingly unfathomable, and in this it attains a rattled, grief-stained vividness.
The Wrestler
2008 (USA)
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler is so narratively straightforward and stylistically reserved (though not in any way humdrum) that I can’t resist comparing it to the director’s output of glittering, coal-black nightmares–Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and the underrated The Fountain–in search of a common thread. True to form, this tale of a 1980s professional wrestler gone miserably to seed bears the stamp of Aronofsky’s unflagging absorption with self-inflicted personal destruction, agonies that promise redemption, release, and annihilation. Eschewing his usual taste for visual flash and wobbly grandiosity, the director here favors gritty realism sans Requiem’s horror gloss. For better or for worse, there’s no cleverness to Aronofsky’s grim gaze in The Wrestler. The film delivers a naked portrait of human endurance, fragility, and entropy, in both their physical and emotional aspects. As the creased and battered Randy “The Ram” Robinson, Mickey Rourke captivates, conveying both the wrestler’s pummeled dreams and the pained simplicity of his ambitions. Aronofsky shies from operatic gesturing, but he also exhibits an unfortunately limp, aimless reliance on sports film tropes. Ultimately, The Wrestler as a fascinating slice of elegant, trim realism, a refreshingly humane vehicle for the director’s compelling, if morbid, artistic sensibilities.
Really looking forward to The Wrestler. As a fan of professional wrestling (I know, I know….but hey, we’re all allowed some trash tv every now and then) I can somewhat guess at the unhappiness in the film in regards to someone way past their prime not being able to walk away from the addiction (the crowds, the ’sport’, the male comradery) known as ’sports entertainment’, despite the fact that they’re really just used for tapping into older fans’ nostalgia.
In wrestling today there are tons of washed up wrestlers still working year-round to make a paycheck because they just can’t let go of the business. It’s a really sad form of addiction, and it doesn’t surprise me, as you so wonderfully pointed out, that Aronofsky was the man for the job.
I’ve been enjoying these updates from the film festival. Keep it up!
If you’re a fan of wrestling, Kevin, I think you’ll appreciate it as a gritty homage to the institution and its personalities. I ran into a co-worker who is a big wrestling fan at the screening, and he thoroughly enjoyed it. Apparently, nearly all the wrestlers in the film other than Rourke’s character are real wrestlers, not actors, mostly from the late-night community center regional wrestling scene.
So in short, highly recommended. I’m a big fan of Aronofsky, and this is every bit the interesting turn for him that the hype has suggested. It’s only a digression in the stylistic sense, certainly not thematically. And if you need any more incentive, there’s the Dirty Old Man factor: Marisa Tomei spends a good portion of the film without clothes on.