A film that can address current issues between Israelis, Germans, Palestinians, gays and straights, taking into account the divergent viewpoints of three generations, and all with sensitivity and truth, is a rare film. This Israeli work by acclaimed director Eytan Fox is just such a film.
It begins near Istanbul on a ferry full of tourists and holiday-makers, with Mossad agent Eyal (Lior Ashkenazi) on assignment to assassinate a Hamas agent. Even in public and in broad daylight he is brutally efficient. Though not recognising it at the time, his success is given less personal weight than the tear-stained face of his target’s young son. On arriving home, the unemotional Eyal finds his wife Iris has committed suicide. The note she left contains a time bomb for Eyal which only surfaces much later in the film, like the face of the young Islamic boy, in a technique of slow revelation of which this director is a master.
Eyal is a man closed off from himself – as perhaps an assassin must be – and even a month later his boss Menachem (Gideon Shemer) will not put him on another potentially dangerous assignment until he has dealt with the tragedy of his wife. Angrily in denial, Eyal disgustedly accepts the interim job of monitoring the German grandchildren, in Israel, of a notorious Nazi war criminal, Alfred Himmelman, with the hope of locating him.
Eyal poses as a tour guide and meets young Axel Himmelman (Knut Berger) at the airport in Tel Aviv, driving him to meet his sister Pia (Carolina Peters) at the kibbutz where she lives and works. Even undercover, Eyal is cold and standoffish, scornful of the pseudo-liberal he judges Axel to be and delighting in frightening him with the news, “You’ve just missed today’s bomb. They usually have one a day, but maybe there’ll be another one for you. Just kidding.” Axel blanches, his smile immediately fading as he realises Eyal is not really joking.
There is a superb tension maintained not only between apparent normality and the undercover spying, but also between the very different characters of the Mossad agent and the two Germans.
Though Eyal is at first quite the stereotypically macho, stoical, inarticulate Israeli male, his sense of humour is dry and the bridge to their understanding each other comes through a shared appreciation of music as well as through honest curiosity each of the other. It’s ironic to see a Nazi war criminal’s grandchildren joyfully and open-heartedly dancing Israeli folk dances in a kibbutz, while the cynical Mossad agent watches sourly from the side, before he slips away briefly to plant a bug in Pia’s room. Later, Pia relates to Axel the Israeli reaction when they find out she is German. “They ask if anyone in my family was a Nazi”, she says, “and when I say yes they look at me with pity, but they don’t stop being friendly.”
The change in Eyal is gradual as he takes Axel around the tourist spots. At the Sea of Galilee, Axel tells Eyal, solemnly but with a hint of a smile, that if they can purify themselves from the inside out, then they can walk on water. As Israeli and German, each with family secrets, each has much to purify and reconcile, and this film has a way of plunging to the depths of the characters with unexpected revelations and deceptive simplicity.
Music is hugely important in this film, both as a way each of the characters come to relate and as an equal voice in the tone and mood. So, the Stephen Stills song “For What it’s Worth” plays potently at least twice during the film lending its significance to the whole film (it begins ‘There’s something happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear. There’s a man with a gun over there, telling me I got to beware. I think it’s time we stop, children, what’s that sound? Everybody look what’s going down.’). And at a Kibbutz Talent Quest, Axel plays a CD of Ester Ofarim’s 1968 hit ‘Cinderella Rockafella’ and mimes it with Pia, the good-heartedness and innocence of it infectious on the developing relationship between the three. Unobtrusively Eyal’s rock-hard facade is softening. A flashback to his wife’s beautiful tear-stained face, morphing into the face of his last victim’s son, both unnerve him and bring him closer to healing an inner emptiness he was unaware he had.
Eyal opens a little to tell Axel something about Iris and what she once said about him. “Women complain that you’re not connected to your emotions. You never cry.” And avoids further revelations with a dry joke before explaining matter-of-factly that a problem with his tearducts means he can’t cry. “I’ve always wondered,” Eyal asks Axel later as they sit around a campfire on the shore of the Dead Sea, “what it was like to grow up in Germany, and suddenly realise what happened.” And Axel thoughtfully replies that he and his friends hardly talk about it, that it seems unrelated to them, in the past.
In such gently organic ways national identifications of the current generation of Israelis and Germans are explored, and later with much more angry reactivity and violence as their differences - including Axel’s openly gay nature and his hook-up with a sexy Arab boy (Yousef (Joe) Sweid) - seem to destroy the beginnings of friendship and disturb Eyal so much that he fails to listen to the last tape of Pia’s and Axel’s conversation before Axel returns to Berlin.
The last act, taking place in Berlin at the 70th birthday party of Axel’s father, contains one of the most spine-chilling scenes, with a riveting aftermath, that I have ever seen in a film. In one masterful scene director Fox shows the different vantage points of three generations of Germans, made more stark when one of them happens to have been a Nazi. In contrast is this tough contemporary Israeli agent, as brutal a killer as any Nazi. The climax is astounding, but perhaps the only way it could have been. A slightly similar scene, thematically, at the end of Roman Polanski’s Death and The Maiden, starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley, carried much the same impact for me.
But it is the coda of the film which carries the true message and the completion of Eyal’s, Pia’s and Axel’s character arcs. Superbly and sensitively acted by all three leads and an equally outstanding support cast, it is beautifully true, human and unpredictable with a heartening hope for future generations. Walk on Water is a masterful film.
© Avril Carruthers 6th March 2005
(9/10)
