The opening shot of Samuel Maoz’s film is a trick. It shows a field of lovely, still sunflowers, drooping under the glare of the Mediterranean sun. This may be logical, considering this is a film set in gorgeous Lebanon. But this shot is a red herring from Maoz: an all-too-brief glimpse of heaven.
Lebanon the country is a large and varied place, as lovely as said sunflowers; Lebanon the film is small, exhausting, violent and relentless. This isn’t a film to celebrate the place it’s named after: it’s no New York, New York; it’s (thankfully) no Australia. Instead, it’s about destruction. In the end, the only consolation we can take from this desolate movie is that it is, at least, an excellent piece of work.
Lebanon’s particularity is that the action is set entirely within the confines of a tank. Is a tank a large presence without? Yes. Is it a large space within? No. Here, the four Israeli soldiers who operate it are stuck in a tiny space, hot, dirty and stinking, and their aim is to kill. Maoz reminds us that each of them is a man, not a machine: young and nervy, and still, somehow, innocent. If they weren’t fighting in the Israel-Lebanon war of 1982, they’d be playing football, chatting up girls, or clocking in nine to five. Instead, they have to be killers. As we follow Herzel, Assi, Yigal and Shmulik prowling around Lebanese territory, you realise that far from being empowered in their armoured machine, they are weakened and vulnerable. They are subject not only to attack from the enemy, but to the whims of their allies. It is, on every level, frightening.
It’s that double entrapment — in a physical place and in a political context — that makes Lebanon such a potent film (and a Golden Lion winner in Venice last year). Many of the wider questions of the war are left out; we just sense them, far off. All we get is these boys in a tank — and, in a way, it’s all we need to know.