Nine years ago, I had a long, one-sided conversation with a Vietnamese colonel out in Spokane, Washington. It was one-sided because he did most of the talking and I did all the note-taking. The facts around this conversation was very much unverifiable as his experience with the war happened far away from the southern capital. To this day, I still remember some of the incredible details he painted.
Last spring, I had a long conversation with a woman I am deeply interested. Her father was also in the war and operated with a highly specialized unit of the South Vietnamese. I don’t think he told her much about the war. It’s hard to talk about it when you played parts of the losing side and is still, in someway, bitter about the ending.
Since 2000, I talked to a lot more Vietnamese about the war, mostly women, older women of my late grandma’s age. I don’t miss her, but just now I came close to shedding a tear. One thing those women share in common about their stories was the hardship they endured during the war. There were a lot of stories about rapings done by the North, and counter-stories about raping done by the South. Surely in war, such crimes were possible, but I believed the propaganda on both sides were just too much to discern the truth.
Among these stories I heard were men who clamped up about the war, included my father. “What is there to talk about?” He rebuffed me whenever I asked. His face almost gave it away, We lost and now we are here.
There are things in life I believed we cannot revisit rationally. Wounds so deep in the mind to explore by traditional means, required different approach to them. Waltz with Bashir is just that. If done by live motion filming, I believe it could not reach the engrossing level its animation could do. The movie shifted in and out of the characters’ mind, so freely that the experience could be best described as floating. If this was done in traditional filming, it would downgrade the serious subject to comedy.
From the trailer above, you expect a story about a character rediscovering his past because, as he put it, this truth “was not stored in his system.” But there is more, much more to the picture. The music is beautiful, moving and psychedelic. The tracks helped the movie shifted from reality into dreams precisely because it finely meshed with what displayed on screen.
A full recommendation from me.
