“Paranoia strikes deep/ Into your life it will creep/ It starts when you’re always afraid/ You step out of line, the man come and take you away.” The words of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” echo through “Walk on Water,” setting the tone in the latest offering from Eytan Fox–director of 2002’s acclaimed “Yossi and Jagger,” a story of gay love in the IDF.
Over the course of the film, the song emerges in not one, but two different versions, establishing a mood for what begins as a tale of personal and societal alienation. As “Walk on Water” unfolds, it explores the pitfalls of both embracing and shirking cultural identities–Israeli, German, and survivor. Ultimately, Fox raises too many complex issues to delve beyond the surface of any single question, but “Walk on Water”‘s sweet, whimsical take on third-generation post-Holocaust relationships between Israelis and Germans has charm–even if it doesn’t stray too far from the shallow end.
As “Walk on Water” opens, we meet Eyal, a hardened Mossad agent who kills without remorse and frequently demands more rigorous missions from his boss. Our hero is jaded, wary of everyone he meets, and hostile to any Palestinian unlucky enough to cross his path. Adding to his melancholy, he is also in mourning: his girlfriend, after telling him that he “kills everything that comes near him,” has recently committed suicide. And if all this isn’t enough to demonstrate Eyal’s intense character, the theme song–“For What it’s Worth”–comes back twice to remind us.
Eyal is on assignment to act as tour guide for a young German man named Axel, in Israel on a visit to his sister Pia, who has been living on a kibbutz. Eyal’s mission is to befriend them\xc2\xa0just long enough to follow them home to Germany. There, he will kill a long-in-hiding Nazi war criminal–who just happens to be their grandfather. As they travel through the Holy Land, the characters form an awkward friendship, though Eyal, a cynical Israeli to the last, is suspicious of the siblings’ enthusiasm over Israeli folk dancing and kibbutz life. When Axel returns to Berlin, Eyal follows him and contrives an invitation to meet Axel’s family, including its patriarch–his target. But the mission results in an unexpected dilemma: Eyal is suddenly forced to choose between allegiance to his career and a sudden wave of sympathy–the first he’s had since we’ve met him.
Eyal’s friendship with Axel forces him to reconsider his role as assassin–and in fact, nearly every aspect of his identity. For one, Axel is openly gay; Eyal is straight. The film is brimming with subtly homoerotic scenes, though neither character follows through on these suggested flirtations. Nevertheless, Eyal reaches out to Axel in a different way: while in Berlin, he beats up a gang of punks who are attacking Axel’s friends, most of whom are cross-dressers. \xc2\xa0
Up until this point, Fox only hints at the legacy of the Holocaust. Now an Israeli is defending modern Germans–and what’s more, ones who would have likely been detained by the Nazis themselves. The German has shifted from aggressor to victim, and the Jew from victim to bodyguard. The audience is left wondering what to do with such a heavyhanded symbolic shift–but at the same time, we’ve come to care enough about the characters to forgive the clumsy symbolism. The moment itself has profound effect on Eyal, who, in the end, is faced with a choice between remaining the numbed exerciser of justice he was–or becoming someone new. \t
In “Beyond Flesh”–a book about Israeli military homoeroticism as depicted in Israeli cinema–author Raz Yosef argues that Zionism stressed “sacrifice [of] family life and erotic relations in the service of the nation.” Eyal, whose commitment to his country has cost him his compassion–and the life of his girlfriend–embodies this sacrifice. When he decides to relinquish that burden, the movie unveils new possibilities for its characters, and possibly the societies they represent.
Fox never explores the Christian overtones of his title, but instead realizes it literally in a playful scene of Eyal and Axel attempting to defy gravity at the edge of the Sea of Galilee. The entire film follows its characters’ attempts to perform stunts nearly as impossible–to rise above ingrained restrictions and prejudices. \xc2\xa0While it leaves most of its weighty themes unresolved, “Walk on Water” does gently question contemporary Jewish/German stereotypes and fears. By successfully weaving together the silly and the sublime, it allows the viewer to imagine a day where these barriers, like Eyal’s, might drift away.
