It's 1982, and four twenty-year-old men are shut up in a tank, rolling into Lebanon with a platoon of soldiers. Young, inexperienced, watching proceedings through their periscopes and heading into the aftermath of an air-strike, they're expected to shell first, ask questions later. When they don't, the more vulnerable infantrymen get killed. When they do, they contribute to the indiscriminate bombardment of a largely civilian area.
And then, as the platoon's only vehicle, they're also used as storage for a corpse, a Syrian prisoner, and the Phalangist soldier who wants to "interrogate" him. And this is all before their hard-edged commanding officer (who drops in on them from above like a visitor from another world) realises that they've blundered into very dangerous territory indeed.
Samuel Maoz's claustrophobic and autobiographical Lebanon, filmed - but for two static shots - entirely inside a tank, is a grimy, unflinching psychological drama, which I wouldn't call political so much as simply honest.
1 comment:
Sounds like something I simply will have to watch.
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