Dir: Eytan Fox, 2005, Israel, 104 mins, subtitles
Cast: Lior Ashkenazi, Knut Berger, Caroline Peters
Review by Philippa Bradnock
Eyal is an Israeli secret service Mossad agent. He is cold as ice, able to kill a Hamas terrorist in front of his wife and child without hesitation. After his wife’s suicide he is assigned to track down a missing Nazi war criminal by ingratiating himself with his grandson, Axel, who arrives in Israel. Liberal ‘peacenik’ Axel has come to visit his sister Pia, on a perpetual Kibbutz, and to do a spot of sightseeing. So Eyal poses as tour guide to Axel in order to discover the grandfather’s whereabouts and a bond grows between them. After Eyal discovers that the grandfather is still alive he is sent to Berlin to investigate further.
Walk on Water reprises the themes of homosexuality and Israeli nationalism explored in director Eytan Fox’s earlier film, Yossi and Jagger. Eyal’s hostile nationalist beliefs set him against both Palestine and Germany, represented by Rafik and Axel. That they are two charismatic and fun loving gay men and Eyal is initially homophobic towards Axel reveals the film’s critique of such simplistic political nationalism. Axel, identified (unsettlingly, given the climate of religious conflict) with Jesus, guides Eyal to emotional salvation from this hard hostility. This metaphorical journey is mirrored in physical travels, emphasised in the driving scenes where Eyal and Axel bond over music. Eyal’s emotional enlightenment is inversely paralleled in his move from the light and space of Israel to the rainy grey concrete of Berlin.
Walk on Water raises interesting questions about the politics of modern Israel and then repeatedly avoids pursuing them. Eyal asks Axel what his childhood discovery of Germany’s past was like. ‘We don’t really talk about it’ he says. In a Berlin roadside restaurant Eyal recalls a school trip to Germany where, for a laugh, schoolmates challenged elderly Germans about their role in the persecution of the Jews. ‘Do you want to play it here?’ asks Axel, but the challenge is sidestepped. Perhaps this is a ploy to provoke thought without straying into polemic. But the glossing over of such turmoil with easy sentimentality feels unsatisfactory.
Despite the film’s focus on this generation’s approaches to their parents’ actions and experiences, familial love or duty are absent and the characters seem isolated. Eyal’s parents and wife are dead, Pia has rejected her parents and Axel seems to have little emotional connection with them. This distancing obviously ensures the siblings’ moral blamelessness. But there is something almost chilling in Pia’s rejection of her parents (and her atoning cultural tourism in Israel) and in Axel’s curious expression as he unplugs his Nazi grandfather. This ability to divorce themselves from the guilt of their family and country is handy for a film preaching cross cultural understanding but again it seems to avoid the real messiness of conflicting loyalties and morals. One can’t help feeling that it’s just not this easy.
Walk on Water is both entertaining and compelling. The film has a thrust which engages even if the characters are a little distant, and it admirably explores important issues without slipping into polemic or speechifying.
