Bodies of land, flesh, politics and families collide in The Bubble, the latest film by Israeli’s most accomplished film director to date, Eytan Fox.
Born in New York City and raised from an early age in Israel, Fox has experienced huge success since he started making films in the early 1990’s. His first feature, Song of the Siren, was Israel’s biggest box office hit of 1994. After creating and directing the Israeli TV dramatic series, Florentine, which was about the ways in which young people dealt with the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin, Fox directed the international hit Yossi and Jagger, which was about an affair between two Israel officers. This was followed up by Walk on Water, the most popular Israeli film abroad to date, The film followed a Mossad agent who befriends the grandson of an ex-Nazi officer.
This exclusive interview with Eytan Fox was conducted in person in Los Angeles late last summer. The interview focused on his most recent movie, The Bubble, so let me provide the following précis:
Noam, Yali, and Lula share an apartment in Tel Aviv. Young progressive Israelis fighting for equality, their political quest for justice gets personal when Noam falls in love with Ashraf, a young Palestinian who hangs out in Tel Aviv pretending to be Israeli while hiding his homosexuality from family and friends back home. When an editor at Time Out Israel threatens to expose his identity, Ashraf returns home, where his sister Rana’s is planning her marriage to a Hamas leader named Jihad, the one Palestinian who knows Ashraf’s secret. As the political and personal play themselves out against the boiling background of Israeli-Palestinian hostilities, The Bubble seems destined to end in tragedy.
John Esther: Why did you want to make this film?
Eytan Fox: I’m an Israeli citizen. I really care about what happens in Israel and its future. The whole subject about the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians is the most crucial subject we face today in Israel. It was important to tackle this issue and these problems in a very straightforward way.
JE: Can someone who’s out as gay be a legitimate suicide bomber according to the Hamas way?
EF: I didn’t ask people, “Would you give a mission to someone who is gay?” I remember rumors about different suicide bombers being gay, but that’s not the issue. Would he be given a mission if he were gay or not gay? The film doesn’t go there. Every suicide bomber, every terrorist, has a specific story which is important to understand.
JE: The ending leaves the three main gay men in the film “without” sex in their lives while Lula presumably marches on to middle-class marital bliss. I cannot recall a film ending on such an ironic, invisible note since Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie. Are the desires of the Israeli Left, especially their gay components, doomed?
EF: I would say the Israeli Left is in a difficult place. Of course, I’m a part of that. I’m attacking myself and trying to put a mirror in front of me and my friends’ faces and saying, “What is happening? What are we doing? Are we doing enough?” Our reality leaves so many people crippled, even castrated, in so many ways. After they do their duty in the Israeli Army, thousands of Israelis leave Israel. They go to India. They’re going there in groups. They do a lot of drugs. They practice Buddhism. They do all of this because they are trying to forget the army.
JE: Was there a particular experience you had doing your service in the army that got to you?
EF: I was lucky. Every Israeli man has his so-called “war.” Mine was the first Lebanese war. I was in Lebanon for over a week. It was very frightening for me, but nothing too terrible happened. I remember a Christmas where I had to be a guard at a church in Bethlehem and I had to ask women and children to show their identity cards, and having to push them around when they didn’t cooperate. I can’t believe I was doing that to people. But I know people go through much more extreme things.
JE: Why did the film take so many shots at Time Out Israel?
EF: These young people who work in Time Out Tel Aviv try as hard as they can to pretend they’re not in the Middle East, that they’re a part of these worldwide trends, fashions, music, and pop culture. I feel for these young people and understand where they’re coming from and why they’re doing what they’re doing. Growing up as a young person in Israel is so difficult. These people need to create this “bubble” system where they can monitor what they allow to come in or what they don’t allow to come in. They want to push things a way and they want to be connected to the rest of the world. Plus, it was easier to shoot at Time Out because my partner works there!
JE: What are the main differences between the ways gays are treated in Israel and in the surrounding Arab territories?
EF: Tel Aviv has become the most amazing city as far as acceptance of the gay life, gay people, and the gay community. There are many gay clubs, bars, restaurants, and television, theatre, and movies. We had a gay parliament member. We have gay municipality members. We have gay pride marches and so on. I don’t want to say this because I want to be accepting of my neighbors, but you have to admit that in most Arab cultures, including Palestine, the way they treat gays is very bad. It’s very backward, not progressive or liberal. When I was shooting the West Bank part in the film in an Arab village where Israeli soldiers shoot the sister, I had a Palestinian assistant director who I asked, what I should say if people ask me what the film is about? He said, “You don’t talk to them. Send them to me.” I said, “Okay, what are you going to tell them?” He said, “I’ll tell them it’s about a poor Palestinian family whose daughter is murdered by the Israeli Army.” I told him, “I’m not going to take advantage of these people. I’m going to tell them the truth.” From then on he felt his job was to keep everyone away from the crazy director who wants to share.
JE: What about Sweid? Can one even “play” homosexual?
EF: Yousef comes from a traditional Arab family. His mother by no means will see this film. She wouldn’t talk to him after she saw him kiss a Jewish girl on Israeli television. I told him once we started work, “Yousef, if you want to do this movie eventually, you have to start sending your mother to a shrink now.”
JE: Your main characters in the film are sympathetic, but what about the general question: how do people embrace democracy for their own citizens yet deny it to others?
EF: If you put that question in their face, they’ll say, “You don’t understand. You live your pampered life in Los Angeles. We’re here fighting for our survival, our existence, and these people want to kill us. We have to do something. We want a Jewish state.” They will say terrible things. The whole thing is frightening because you don’t know where it’s going. These things are bound to explode in our faces. How do you deal with this?
JE: What’s really driving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at this point—ethnicity, religion, modernity, land?
EF: We lost a chance. The Palestinians could have been nonreligious moderates and more modernized. The way we have handled the conflict has pushed them into the way of extremism, religion, and terrorism. I’m not a historian or politician, but I talk to people. The problem today is that there’s so much fear and distrust of each other. I don’t know what has to be done to overcome those emotions.
JE: What do you think of interviews such as this in which you discuss yourself and your work? Do they serve the work or should the work speak for itself?
EF: I remember looking for interviews with Ingmar Bergman, Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Francois Truffaut, and Alfred Hitchcock. I wanted to hear about these peoples’ lives, families, women, children, and so on. I understood more films through the people who made the films. Not only directors, but I also wanted to hear from actors, screenwriters, and cinematographers. You can learn and appreciate what a cinematographer does with lighting and colors if you know how they grew up. I can also understand people not caring because it doesn’t help them. It confuses them. They want to judge something for what it is without knowing about it. This has been challenging.
