LONDON: Ah, the battle tank. Claustrophobic, dark, deadly, manned by cramped, sweaty men, it’s moist with narrative and metaphorical possibilities. Several more or less distinguished films have placed the tank at the center of the action. Its most effective cinematic deployment, however, was in Emir Kusturica’s “Underground” (1995). Here, those Serbs who had gone underground to flee the Nazis were made to devote their energies to arms manufacture. In a fine bit of condensation, their pride and joy is the tank they’d built, and they all clamber into it when afraid.

Israeli writer-director Samuel Maoz has contributed to this tank movie genre with his new film “Lebanon.” It walked away from the Venice film festival with the Golden Lion earlier this year and is nowadays screening at the London Film Festival.

“Lebanon” marks the third time in as many years that an Israeli director has produced a film that uses his army’s experiences in Lebanon as a hook for a loss-of-innocence movie. All three have received critical adulation – the first two, “Beaufort” and “Waltz with Bashir,” were nominated for Academy Awards and, with Maoz’s Venice win, it seems likely “Lebanon” will too. Part of a phenomenon as much as a film, “Lebanon” warrants a cool-headed appraisal.

The film opens on the first day of the Israeli Army’s 1982 invasion. A tank crew prepares to enter Lebanon. There is no proper commander, so the ranking solider is Assi (Itay Tiran). Soon after crossing the border, you are introduced to Jamil (Zohar Shtrauss), the commander of the paratrooper unit that the tank accompanies north.

The story depicts the soldiers’ sweep through a bombed-out Lebanese village. As it moves north, the tank comes under attack. Its young crew doesn’t perform particularly well and as figures from outside come and go – Jamil, a slain comrade, a Syrian Army soldier, a Phalange militiaman – the Israelis become ever more traumatized.

It’s a simple formula that doesn’t stray far from the historical record and in technical terms “Lebanon” can’t be faulted. The acting is competent, and  though fictional soldiers invariably fall into stereotypes, there is at least some variety. Like stories of its type, involving movement through dangerous terrain, this one is fairly taut.

Cinematographer Giora Bejach’s framing of the tank’s interior is replete with close-ups of ammunition and young men’s sweaty, unshaven faces. Bejach is fond of capturing their faces reflected in the dank pool splashing in the tank’s belly, which grows progressively more filthy as the film wears on.

So far, so laudatory. The devil, as they say, is in the in the narrative details. In these, “Lebanon” is symptomatic of both “Beaufort” and “Waltz with Bashir” in its problematic depiction of “us” and “them.”

Judges and journalists at Venice were enamored of Bejach’s innovative exterior cinematography. Most of what the audience sees of Lebanon is shot though a facsimile of a gunner’s sights, crosshairs and all. A smashed and bloody nightmare by day, night-time Lebanon is made to look all the more surreal, as the gunner’s night-vision equipment renders the landscape a radioactive green.

It’s a provocative visual device and Maoz, it seems, wants to push these buttons, forcing audiences to empathize with these innocents for whom the outside world can only be seen as a target. 

Underlining this conundrum, the neophyte gunner twice refuses to fire his cannon when the unit is under attack.

It will be recalled that Ari Folman’s autobiographical narrator in “Waltz with Bashir” was also unable to shoot at people. There, the young Folman’s shortcomings got him detailed to shoot Lebanese guard dogs, allowing him to retain innocence in combat. In “Lebanon” the gunner doesn’t get off so lightly.

As the tank advances north, Jamil delivers a stirring speech, reminding the tank crew that an internationally recognized convention bans the use of phosphorus weapons against civilians. Israel, he claims, observes this convention.

Anyone aware of the multiple charges accusing the Israeli Army of this very crime may smirk at this bit of ham-fisted PR. As they’re only getting one side of the story, gormless audience members may take the information as gospel.

After he twice loses men because the gunner doesn’t fire, Jamil modifies his orders, telling him it’s now time to use phosphorus weapons. “Up to now it’s been cops and robbers,” Jamil says. “Now it’s war.”

It is entirely likely that a raw recruit in a wartime army like Israel’s has frozen in battle, and that some of his fellow troops died as a result. The scenario’s plausibility isn’t at issue.

The film suggests that the very decency of these Israeli soldiers forces them to violate international human-rights conventions – so, by extension, that Israeli soft-heartedness has made the country’s army so indiscriminately lethal to non-combatants (women, children, activists, journalists, UN observers, et al). 

There is a back-story to such assertions that Maoz does not discuss. It involves the cognitive dissonance between Israel’s claims as “the only democracy in the Middle East” and its army’s richly documented profile as the ruthless agent of an occupation policy that systematically strips Palestinians (within Israel and the Occupied Territories) of their lands and basic human rights.

It is impossible to separate Maoz’s film from his country’s public relations struggle and unlikely that Western audiences will empathize for his tank crew without extending that feeling to the Israeli Army as a whole. 

By depicting its soldiers as naive innocents who inadvertently do bad things because they so consistently err on the side of good – while glossing over why they invade foreign countries to start with – Maoz simply misrepresents the Israeli Army and its record.

Much as it veers from veracity, this representation of Israeli soldiery’s virtue is precisely the image that audiences should expect from the country’s state-funded film industry, and from the genre of war pictures generally. The same is true of Maoz’s, equally fallacious, representation of non-Israelis.

At one point, the infantrymen come under attack from militants (keffiyyeh-wrapped “terrorists”) in a bombed-out house. The gunner’s sights discern that the house has a Christian religious painting hanging from a wall. The residents are still inside and, rather than ignoring them, the militants take them hostage.

Oddly, the militants choose to reproduce the exact hostage-taking choreography devised by television and movie directors for their villains: The militant’s left arm goes around the neck of the (female) hostage, while the right hand holds a gun to the side of her head.

Yes, it is true that, after years of arbitrary rule by Palestinian gunmen, some residents of south Lebanon did welcome the arrival of an army determined to dislodge them. Maoz’s choreography of the solider-civilian-militant relationship, however, presents it as one of policeman-victim-criminal. It’s a nifty recasting of the narrative – one that will appeal to Western audiences of a humanitarian-interventionist frame of mind – but not one that squares with complex historical realities.

Maoz’s “Lebanon” is an interesting cultural artefact. 

The motif of claustrophobia that “Lebanon” shares with “Beaufort” – where, at the end of Israel’s occupation of south Lebanon – another unit of innocent young troops were afraid to leave a fortress surrounded by invisible enemies) is informative. It seems to reflect the laager mentality afflicting a culture after 60 years of war with its neighbours and occupation of their lands.

It is interesting, if pointless, to speculate why the two soldiers in positions of authority are given Arab names (Jamil and Assi), while the rest of the tank crew is Ashkenazi.

Mostly, however, “Lebanon” is interesting because it is the third high-profile film of its type to narrate a political position to cinema audiences that is already amply represented in prevailing media narratives and in the corridors of power.

One question arises from this trilogy of therapy sessions for Israeli militarism. Why must Israeli filmmakers have their soldiers lose their innocence in Lebanon? Yes, its intractable nature makes Israel’s Lebanon occupation resemble Vietnam, and it’s important for Israel to find sympathy among the voters of its patron.

Still, why not look closer to home, to their army’s 60-year-old occupation of Palestinian lands to find the innocence they’re purported to have lost? It was not so long ago that Israeli sociologists remarked worriedly upon how the routine shooting of stone-throwing Palestinian children, the uprooting of olive trees and the dispossession of Palestinian families was having a deleterious effect upon the emotional stability of army recruits.

In fact, 2009 has provided an opportunity to see an Israeli camera cast its gaze upon uniformed Israelis among Palestinians, thanks to Yaron Shani and Scandor Copti’s “Ajami,” which has also screened at the London film festival. 

The uniformed men are policemen, rather than soldiers, and the Palestinians are ’48 Palestinians in the underprivileged Jaffa neighborhood of Ajami, rather than their cousins in the territories, but the effect is the same.

Here, we find bewildered Israeli policemen trying to help Palestinians afflicted by a criminal drug-and-gun culture. All morally upright men, the Israeli police are conflicted when they shoot. Ajami’s Arab criminals always seem to shoot first. 

Again, it’s likely that few who know Ajami would question the criminality of the place. What is questionable is the way it allows their condition to drift suspended above such mundane considerations as the relationship between criminality and political and economic disenfranchisement.

Commercial filmmakers, and their collaborators in film distribution and film journalism, will point out that the sole convention to which feature films must conform is good story-telling. In this, fiction film differs from documentary, where some semblance of balance might be expected. 

Yet many documentary-makers are not interested in the dogged pursuit of factual balance, effectively alleviating that form from the responsibility of telling the mundane truth. This is somewhat worrying for those who recognize that film does inform popular opinion and the often crass stereotypes that roam there.

An appreciation of the prevailing conventions of commercial cinema may explain why Israeli filmmakers, and the country’s solvent and activist film fund, have bent their minds to the production of works like “Beaufort,” “Watz with Bashir” and “Lebanon.” 

As with successful commercial movies generally, effectively told personal stories make audiences sympathetic to their characters. The fact that these personal tales are couched within an uncritical (fallacious) back-story of Israeli innocence thrust into a cesspool of Arab terrorism and criminality draws audiences into that master narrative. 

In a theater of fiction, an audience’s compromises with narrative and stagecraft used to be called “willing suspension of disbelief.” A cinema purportedly “based on real events” foists upon audiences a willing suspension of understanding.