The Bubble, a Film by Eytan Fox

I've just returned from seeing Israeli director Eytan Fox's new film The Bubble. You may have heard of his previous films Walk on Water, and Yossi and Jagger, which has been ridiculed in a previous posting on this site (I thought that snow cavorting scene, notwithstanding the problematic Lebanese backdrop, was very sweet!). A hugely popular director in Israel with a lot of crossover success, Fox's films have been getting increasingly political on the Palestinian issue. From an absent enemy status in Yossi and Jagger, to the introduction of a major Arab character in Walk on Water (Yousef Sweid, who plays the role of Ashraf in The Bubble), to finally tackling the conflict head on in this film.

The plot recounts the story of an Israeli reservist disgusted with the occupation, who notices Ashraf the Palestinian love interest being degraded at a checkpoint. Their lives intersect again in Tel Aviv, where Ashraf escapes to for work. He becomes part of the Israeli leftists social circle, before political events and murder in the West Bank drive events toward a fiery climax. Eytan Fox is openly gay and makes many connections between the oppressed status of homosexuals and Palestinians. He is a critic of the violent culture of masculinity which he believes, much like the Lebanese scholar Evelyn Accad, to be responsible for war in general.

The film, which tackles the subject of Israeli-Palestinian relationships, indulges in many of the clichés one would expect: cultural relativity, Arab wedding fading into Israeli beach ecstacy rave, tears followed by sex, and finally, whowuddathunkit?!, a suicide bombing. But beyond this, the film makes many important and sometimes touching statements: about the impermeability of cultures that paradoxically causes enemies to love each other more, about the naiveté of peace movements and how they get crushed, about wounded masculinity and what it must do to avenge itself. This last theme is one that was tread in Paradise Now (which I though was infinitely inferior to Divine Intervention, the only Palestinian art-house film worthy of the name!), what with the main character having to atone for his deceased father's collaboration and dishonor via the most forceful of methods. Homosexuals in Israel and Palestine are not assumed to be of the same kind, and much time is spent telling, without judgment, how each negotiates their own space.

Of course the film won't pass a radicalism test, but I think it's notable already for the stir it's caused in Israel and the connections it makes between machismo and war, in a way that doesn't subsume gender to nation or vice versa, but shows how one is integral to the other. The film is called The Bubble in reference to the bubbles that many bystanders to conflict find themselves in, capable only of seeing and caring about what's inside their sphere.