The wall between narrative and documentary film may be permanently demolished in a season when Chloé Zhao’s “Nomadland” are already winning awards. While the grit of neorealism has been a part of film history for decades, presenting a story within a specific, very real world of non-actors and hearing their stark, unscripted voices brings a level of immediacy and realism that tarnishes the gloss of ordinary films.
That kind of power shines through Talia Lugacy’s latest, “This is Not a War Story,” a clear-eyed, ambitious and ultimately hopeful story told through the eyes of veterans, broken by the system and striving every day to keep it together.
A filmmaking teacher at New York’s New School, Lugacy herself is a standout of the work, portraying Isabelle, a former Marine MP back in Brooklyn, a little hollow and searching for something. She’s got a limp from an unnamed injury, and a huge chip on her shoulder. She’s a loner, angry, and like way too many thousands of veterans, considers suicide on nearly a daily basis.
A bartender by night, she stumbles into a local vets’ self-help workshop — a branch of the real organization Frontline Paper in which old, worn military uniforms are torn and chopped up in order to be made into pulp, creating handmade (and hard won) paper on which veterans express themselves further with art and poetry.
Actual veterans’ art and poems enliven the film, as do their idle conversation in the shop as they gather from various generations and past failed wars, to discuss their histories.