Yoav Donat & Itay Tiran in Lebanon

"Walk in the park," says the scowling Israeli army commanding officer to four scared, young members of a tank crew in the first hours of the 1982 Lebanon war. Their mission is simple: to "clean up" a Lebanese town recently bombed by the Israeli Air Force, and grind on to the next stage of the invasion.

The combat and aftermath we witness in the superb new film "Lebanon," from writer-director Samuel Maoz, is experienced almost wholly from the perspective of the soldiers inside the tank. Our primary reference point, the gunner played by Yoav Donat, spends much of his time peering at the chaos outside through a periscopic gun sight. He is in the thick of the horror, yet oddly detached.

Early in the film we're shown a slogan on the inside of the tank wall reading "Man is steel. The tank is only iron." Maoz, who was 20 when he served as a tank gunner in the early phase of the Lebanon war, offers little in the way of comforting valor or conventional, can-do heroism. This conflict defied such things, Maoz's stern, gripping picture implies. We are thrown into a miserably confining arena of panic and will and guesswork, and the 94 minutes of "Lebanon" are about as intense as an autobiographical war drama can be.

"Das Boot," Wolfgang Petersen's German U-boat thriller (originally a five-hour miniseries), is the obvious claustrophobic precursor, but "Lebanon" is a more penetrating and mournful work, a companion piece to Ari Holman's "Waltz With Bashir," achieved in a style as forthright as Holman's film was visually inventive. The men in battle emerge less as memorably etched characters and more as variations on a theme of raw youth, seriously tested. The gunner, Shmuel, fails his first test under fire, and that failure haunts the rest of the picture. The commander (played by Itay Tiran), the loader (Oshri Cohen) and the driver (Michael Moshonov) are visited periodically by the officer (Zohar Shtrauss, brilliantly ambiguous in his aura and motives), whose promise of an easy mission turns out to be a confounding ambush.

Some of the tensions are semantic, as when one character reminds another that the (illegal) sulfur bombs used in battle are henceforth to be referred to as "flaming smoke." The rest are horrifyingly tactile. By the time "Lebanon" reaches its climax, in which the tank crew participates in the shelling of a building housing Christians being held hostage by terrorists, Maoz has brought us well past the specifics of what he experienced in 1982 near the Israeli/Lebanon border. We could be anywhere, in almost any post-industrial war, with no nobility in sight.

It's an uncompromising drama, not easy to watch. And it is one of the year's highlights.

 

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"Lebanon" Movie Trailer

 

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MPAA rating: R (for disturbing bloody war violence, language including sexual references and some nudity).

Running time: 1:34.

Cast: Yoav Donat (Shmuel); Itay Tiran (Assi); Oshri Cohen (Hertzel); Michael Moshonov (Yigal); Zohar Shtrauss (Jamil); Dudu Tassa (Syrian captive).

Credits: Written and directed by Samuel Maoz; produced by Uri Sabag, Einat Bikel, Moshe Edery, Leon Edery, David Silber, Benjamina Mirnik and Ilann Girard. A Sony Pictures Classics release. In Hebrew, Arabic, French and English, with English subtitles.