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Between Sex And Country: The Films of Eytan Fox
by Shai Ginsburg
It is the middle of winter and the ground is covered with snow in a remote Israeli army outpost near the border with Lebanon. In a crowded room, sitting on an army bed, Yossi, a young lieutenant, is studying a map, preparing for an ambush his platoon has been assigned for that night. Next to him, Jagger, his second in command, is playing his guitar. “Will you stay with me if I lose a leg?” asks Jagger. “That could actually be convenient for certain positions,” retorts Yossi. “And what if my face gets all burnt, and I have only one eye left? … What if I die and you haven’t even told me that you love me?” Jagger persists. “And what if I die,” Yossi loses his patience, “because instead of going over the action today, you decided to be a nudge?”
This scene from Eytan Fox’s prize-winning film, Yossi and Jagger (Israel, 2002) exemplifies the central theme that has preoccupied Fox throughout his career: the friction between the private and public spheres that shapes much of contemporary life in Israel (and has haunted Jewish life in Palestine since the beginning of its national settlement in the late nineteenth century). In Fox’s films and TV dramas, that friction is often presented as a tension between the sexual interests of his characters—in particular, though not exclusively, homosexual interests—and a preoccupation in their surroundings with matters of national security, including military service, the Lebanon War, the first Gulf War, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Yossi and Jagger follows the daily routine of soldiers stationed at a secluded outpost and the homosexual affair between its two main characters. At the center of the drama lies Yossi’s unwillingness to “come out” and make public his sexuality. Jagger insists, “We’ll take our next vacation together in Eilat and we’ll book a room and ask for one bed, king-size, queen-size, I don’t care … and when I finish the service, I’m telling my mother, and you’re coming with me to meet her and my father.” Yossi, on the other hand, recoils: “This is how it is. I never promised it would ever be different. So you have a choice: either live with it or leave.” Yossi accepts the masculine code of the army, which also colors the film’s articulation of Israel’s security concerns, and refuses to compromise it for the sake of his relationship with Jagger.
While Yossi and Jagger carry on an affair that they must conceal, Jagger is pursued by Ya’eli, the platoon’s female clerk, who is unaware of his sexual orientation. The romance between the young woman and the soldier is an important component of the Israeli military myth. Fox’s film thus juxtaposes Yossi and Jagger’s affair—sexually explicit yet bound to remain repressed—and Ya’eli’s platonic-romantic fantasies of Jagger, which, while never realized, become the “official, public story” about Jagger’s character.
After (1990), Fox’s graduation project from the Department of Film and Television at Tel Aviv University, similarly deals with issues of masculinity, homosexuality, and military service. The film takes place during the Lebanon War (1982–1986), and portrays Erez, a ruthless platoon commander who hazes Jonathan, one of his subordinates. The night before the platoon is scheduled to move into Lebanon, the soldiers receive a short leave (“after,” in Israeli military slang) in Jerusalem. As Jonathan strolls through Independence Park at the center of the city, he spots his commander and follows him as he enters the public restrooms. There, Jonathan can hear the noises emanating from one of the stalls, as Erez is having homosexual sex. Fox neither criticizes the politics of the War nor reflects on the rifts it has created in Israeli society; in fact, as in his other films, he builds on crude stereotypes to sketch social and political issues. At the center of the film is not political but sexual drama—the struggle of Jonathan and Erez to place their sexuality within Israeli society.
In Song of the Siren (1994), Fox likewise chisels the same themes into relief. Based on Irit Linur’s best-selling novel of the same name, the movie tells of Talila Katz, a yuppie Tel-Avivian advertising executive who searches for true romance in the midst of the national hysteria of the first Gulf War (1991)—to the sound of sirens that warn the public of impending scud attacks. She moves back and forth between Noah Ne’eman, the clumsy but good-hearted food engineer, and her cynical yuppie ex-boyfriend, Ofer Strassberg. Unlike Fox’s other films, Song highlights and glorifies heterosexual romance. Still, it too explores the relationship between the private and the public, as Talila strives to locate a space for herself in which she can realize her romantic fantasies despite—or in defiance of—the public preoccupation with the “really important” matters of life and death.
Between 1997 and 2000, Fox created the commercially successful—and critically acclaimed—television series, Florentin. Following a pattern quite familiar in American TV, the series follows the lives of a group of twenty-somethings who live in the Florentin quarter in southern Tel Aviv. Like the characters of its American counterparts, these are self-engrossed singles who shy away from any explicit political or social commitments and try instead to discover their personal presents and futures. They seem to live in a detached bubble, protected from the political and ideological hustle and bustle of Israeli reality. In the fifth episode of the first season, however, the bubble seems about to explode as reality forcefully intrudes with the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin. The characters must suddenly examine themselves and their ties with Israeli reality. Still, the series does not turn into a socio-political study; on the contrary, in the following seasons the assassination and its psychological remnants dissipate and the characters are left unscathed within their bubble again.
Indeed, Florentin’s innovation lies not in its political subtext, but in its sexual one: Fox sets at the center of the series openly gay characters whose sexuality is presented as accepted without much ado. The series normalizes the quest for sexual identity and the discovery of queerness, setting it in the middle of Israeli urban culture.
Fox’s latest film, Walk on Water (2004), is currently showing in theaters in the United States. The movie’s protagonist, Eyal, is a Mossad agent who is asked to befriend Pia and Axel, two German siblings, in the hope of tracking down their grandfather, a Nazi war criminal who was responsible for the ethnic cleansing of a whole region in Germany; among his few survivors are Eyal’s supervisor and late mother. Pia lives on a kibbutz, and when Axel comes to visit her, Eyal introduces himself as a tour guide to the young German and takes him on a tour of the country. Despite their differences, the two men grow closer, but their relationship becomes strained when Eyal discovers that Axel is gay and that the man he picks up at a nightclub in Tel Aviv is Palestinian. Much relieved when Axel leaves Israel, Eyal is then sent after Axel to Berlin in the hope that the grandfather will show up at his son’s—Pia’s and Axel’s father’s—approaching birthday party.
Despite a dense political plot that juxtaposes the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Israel’s obsession with the Holocaust, and Israelis’ ambivalence towards Europe in general and towards the “new” Germany in particular, the film’s main concern is the intense relationship between Eyal and Axel. Their interaction provides Fox, once again, with the opportunity to reflect upon the tension between personal and collective space. Eyal’s commitment to the national mission comes with a heavy price: the destruction of the family. The opening scene shows Eyal in Istanbul tagging a Hamas member who takes a boat trip with his wife and young child; though Eyal establishes eye-contact with the child and exchanges smiles with him, he nevertheless proceeds to assassinate the boy’s father. Eyal then returns to Israel and, after celebrating his success with his fellow Mossad agents, he returns home to discover the dead body of his wife, who has committed suicide and left a note accusing Eyal of killing everything that comes near him. Obsession with Israel’s national security, Fox suggests, undermines the ability to set up viable interpersonal relationships—not only for Palestinians, but for Jewish Israelis as well.
The burden of the collective story impinges not only on the Israeli but on the German family as well. The Nazi past that lingers beneath the façade of normalcy of Pia’s and Axel’s family ultimately undoes it: when Pia discovers that her grandfather is not dead, as her parents have assured her, and that they have maintained ties with him in his hiding place, she severs her ties with her parents. Traveling to India, she meets an Israeli and follows him to his kibbutz, but once he discovers her family history, he breaks things off with her; this pattern repeats itself in all of her subsequent relationships with Israeli men. The logic that undermines the Palestinian, Jewish-Israeli, and German families is similar, if not the same.
At the center of Fox’s film lies the wounded heterosexual family unit and, more specifically, the role men play in undoing it. The movie sets up the growing relationship between the male-chauvinist Eyal and the homosexual Axel as a tikkun of that broken vessel. The transformation that Eyal undergoes throughout the film—the dismantling of his macho façade—is apparent. Yet Axel also has to change in order to grapple with his family history and position as a German vis-à-vis Israel; his transformation, while not as obvious, is as important as Eyal’s and forms the climax of the film. The salvation of the family, the film ultimately suggests, lies in protecting the purity of the private sphere and repelling whatever elements of collective, national ideals that subvert it.
Fox is accused at times of being a conservative filmmaker, because his films do not criticize or ironize the socio-ideological reality in which they take place. This marks a departure from traditional Israeli film-making which, until recently, and unlike American Hollywood cinema, has explicitly focused on socio-ideological themes and used its characters to comment upon Israeli society and its foundational and dominant ideologies.
Indeed, Fox has little to say about the Israeli social and ideological narrative; often, he seems simply to accept it as determining the material conditions within which his characters must realize themselves and their sexuality. In this sense, his films represent the ever-growing influence of American commercial cinema and television on Israeli media. His films create the impression that sexuality and gender are somehow detached from the hot political issues that preoccupy Israeli society. They have more to do with the personal decisions of his characters to accept their authentic selves (or their inability to do so) than with the social reality in which they live.
Με την ταινία του Eytan Fox “The Bubble”(2006) ξεκινάει σήμερα στις 21.00 στον κινηματογράφο ΤΡΙΑΝΟΝ το "1ο Φεστιβάλ Ομοφυλοφιλικών ταινιών της Αθήνας"
