Wasted

Veteran filmmaker Nurit Kedar’s accomplished documentary Wasted (based on Ron Leshem’s novel If There Is a Heaven) is a candid look at Israeli soldiers who served in the fortress of Beaufort in Southern Lebanon before Israel’s withdrawal in 2000. These young men go to war and come back changed. What is remembered is sometimes profound and sometimes banal: the smell of oil and schnitzel, the smell of your girlfriend on a shirt, the smell of feet and the smell of your own fear. In this quiet, elegant film about the horrors of war, the camera searches the young soldiers’ faces, knowing their gestures tell as much as their words. The interviews unfold deftly—a credit to the articulateness of the men and the sparing precision of Kedar’s directing and that of her editor. The man lived each day on the mountain, teeth clenched between blasts, hoping not to survive a hit: death was better than amputation. It was an absurd theatre of war; one soldier remarks, “I never saw anyone to shoot at.” Another asks, “Who and what were we guarding? We were simply safeguarding ourselves so that we could make it out when the mission ended.” Interviews with the soldiers, who spent months in the fortress’s claustrophobic rabbit warren, are interspersed with chillingly exquisite footage of the male dancers from Bat Sheva Dance Company, directed by Ohad Naharin (one of Israel’s leading choreographers). Packed tightly together—moving like soldiers or brothers or a bizarre minyan—their simulation of living in such close quarters, of being blown up, of almost being one organism is strangely beautiful at the same as it is absolutely spine tingling.