Walk On Water

Eytan Fox’s film confronts the modern German response to the Holocaust head-on in the form of a contemporary thriller and adds to it the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians, the attitude towards homosexuality entrenched in the profoundly patriarchal Israeli social system, ultimately mounting a passionate plea for universal tolerance and understanding in a film about relationships between people, cultures, beliefs and places.

Eyal (Lior Ashkenazi) is an agent for the Israeli Secret Service, Mossad. After the death of his wife, he is assigned to an undercover role as a tour guide for Axel, the grandson of an ailing Nazi war criminal, in the hope of bringing the latter to justice.

The film depicts the criss-crossing strands of empathy and conflict that constitutes human relations at both the personal and the political, structuring them around a dialectic of psychological opposites represented by the two male leads. Here Lior Ashkenazi is compelling as the inflexibly stoical Eyal, a man who is only able to recognize himself in the disconnected machismo of his role as a professionally-sanctioned killer. In contrast, Knut Berger as the other-directed Alex in his softness and openness presents to Eyal an unarticulated challenge which slowly “unmans” him.

There will be those who will, with justice, find the latter part of the film, once Eyal goes to see Axel in Berlin, narratively unconvincing and the coda to the main narrative is really a bit too much particularly as it rather abruptly replaces the apparently burgeoning gay component of the relationship between Eyal and Axel (itself part of the 'gay' theme that grows more prominent as the film progresses).

Although promoted as thriller as the title with its allusion to the miraculous suggests, the film is above all a statement of its maker’s well-meant idealism. 

 

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