Eyes wide open

Would a devout Orthodox Jewish butcher, happily married with four young children, suddenly sense an uncontrollable desire to wet-kiss a homeless gay Torah student who's provided no clear seductive moves or signs of his homosexuality? Just after his butcher-father's death? In Jerusalem, in the old, traditionalist Hasidic quarter? Very soon after letting the younger man borrow his cellphone and giving him a job and a storeroom to sleep in? Would the younger man make passionate love while still pining for his previous Orthodox lover?

Audiences are expected to accept such far-fetched fairy-tale ideas by Eyes Wide Open. In parts, it's an interesting Israeli docudrama too, enabling outsiders to view and vaguely understand aspects of Jewish Orthodoxy: kissing entry doors, wearing two hats and vests, being bearded and conformist, the importance of cleansing rituals, ways to cut kosher meat, love of debate and questioning, belonging to an ultra-self-defensive minority. All that, and more insights, adds special value to an otherwise standard man-meets-man storyboard.

There have already been Mormon, cowboy, neo-Nazi and Muslim gay dramas, and there may well be Sikh, Amish, Tibetan Buddhist and Voodoo versions yet to be seen. There's even been a documentary feature about Hasidic gays (Trembling Before G-d, 2001). This 2009 dramatic contribution to the genre is good of its kind due to above-average pacing, lighting, editing and acting. It's a debut feature for both the writer (Merav Doster) and director (Haim Tabakman). Zohar Strauss (playing the tempted father) was previously seen in a supporting part in Lebanon and his co-lead, America-born Ran Danker, had one previous starring role in an Israeli movie (Restless). Their facial acting during silent scenes adds much to the stilted euphemistic dialogue, contradictory mood changes and fundamental incredibilities.

There's an eastern European air to the movie, a Chekhovian reticence, and a miserable final scene signalling self-repression and providing adding a touch of reality to this offbeat tale of doomed love.

Lebanon

Of all the wars fought by Israel, the ones that probably most damaged both the country's overseas image and its self-respect were waged in neighbouring Lebanon. Samuel Maoz was a young Israeli army recruit stuck in an invading tank in 1982, and his experiences led him to write and direct Lebanon. It won the Golden Lion at the 2009 Venice Film Festival, the Israeli film industry's first win there, and stirred up controversy and no film awards at home: its anti-war sentiment exposes the brutality and lies a country's leaders impose on their young soldiers.

Four novice army recruits are posted to a tank ordered to enter an air-bombed Lebanese village. One drives the "rhinoceros"; the gunner, loader and tank commander squeeze into the turret. Their only views of the outside world are through periscoped gun sights, which highlight their killing machine's purpose: the outside world is a landscape of targets inhabited by people who seem to be in an alien, impersonal world.

The tank, even more than the submarine in Das Boot, is a harsh, ugly military environment filled with the smells of fuel, urine, sweat and explosives. For a time, it also contains the corpse of an Israeli soldier the tank crew had caused to die. A professional commanding officer enters too, browbeating the scared, tired and dirty crewmen. They are instructed to fire illegal phosporus bombs in a clandestine way, and hold a Syrian POW inside the turret. Their nastiest outside visitor is a vicious Arabic-speaking Phalangist (Lebanese Catholic) who, unknown to the crew, puts the fear of Allah into the POW.

The gun sight shows bloodied corpses, maimed bodies, terrified children and women, eyes staring hatefully, buildings demolished. The reality of war, as the writer-director presents it, is never a matter of personal heroism or nationalist pride. It's shown as a living nightmare its participants have to learn how to live through, or die. The tank's dark and dingy setting, its claustrophobic atmosphere, the space restrictions and inevitable mechanical problems and personality conflicts do not glorify this type of mechanised warfare. It's condemned vividly, by a man whose first-hand experience and disgust can be sensed, almost smelt and felt, throughout the docudrama.

Ajami

Not surprisingly for a Hollywood-based membership club, the Oscar academy has given nominations for Best Foreign Language Film to many of Israel's offerings. The third of three successive nods went to Ajami, a bilingual Hebrew-Arabic docudrama co-written, -directed and -edited by Scandar Copti (Palestinian) and Yaron Shani. It portrays life in Ajami, a run-down ethnically-mixed district in Jaffa.

Copti also plays one of the lead characters in a Crash-style quilt of five overlapping tales about violence and death, and religious (Muslim-Christian) and racial (Jewish-Arabic) antagonisms. No character is happy with their life; many are killed by accident or design, and no person, authority or race emerges with honour at the end of the two-hour docudrama.

The scenario holds few dramatic surprises: Ajami is an inner-city area as prone to urban warfare as that of The Wire or movies set in Belfast or Balkan lands. What is exceptional is the ensemble acting by a cast of local non-professionals, including former Israeli policemen, Muslim schoolchildren and middle-aged housewives. Coached by a professional acting teacher and the two directors, the amateurs role-play and interact in the classic styles of Method Acting and Mike Leigh movies. They had no scripted dialogue and "lived" their parts (as shown neatly in the movie's DVD extra).

Several of the family scenes, whether in Hebrew or Arabic, sound and look like cine-verite. Some set-pieces are eye-opening cultural revelations, as in the traditional Arabic parley to decide the compensation costs of a lethal inter-family feud, and the melodramatics of a grieving Jewish family.

The fly-on-the-wall documentary style of the movie is heightened by abrupt pauses for "chapter" numbers, sudden changes in plot chronology, cuts to black, and repetition of events from a different viewpoint or with extra information that deliberately overturns previous audience assumptions. The increasing tension of the movie is maintained well, however, as it becomes increasingly clear that one evil always led to another and will continue to do so.

The Israeli film industry was wise in 2009 to choose this film as its official flag-bearer. A harsh critic might accuse the movie of spending too much respectful time on the Jewish family's grief at losing a soldier son and comparatively far less on the many Arab deaths; the movie had to appeal to its primary audience. A kind critic would congratulate the movie's creative pair for depicting evil intentions and deeds committed by both races no matter what their religion is.

Little traitor

Every nation's film industry is entitled to a nationalist phase. It would usually arise soon after the land's most recent revolution or military campaign. Heroic figures appear centre stage, full face and overlit. Peasants find cause to dance in the streets or frolic in fields. Political issues and internal disputes are invisible, airbrushed or rewritten in line with the victorious party's platform or leadership egos. The resultant self-image of proud new nations is displayed ingenuously in many state-sponsored movies. Even in Israel's The Little Traitor.

It is such an old-fashioned cliche-splattered piece of stagy film-making that a 21st-Century movie-goer might assume it was produced around 1950, soon after the creation of Israel. The movie covers the last year of the British Mandate, as seen by an 11-year-old sabra (locally-born) boy in Jerusalem, "Proffy". It's hard to warm to the precocious, egocentric, would-be anti-British terrorist and frustrated killer, even though his young actor (Ido Port) smiles nicely at times.

His migrant parents are lovingly harsh, preoccupied with providing nocturnal safe passage for Jewish refugees from Europe. Consequently, believe it or not, his best adult influence will prove to be a middle-aged British army sergeant (Alfred Molina valiantly coping with a preposterous plotline and script). The Brit is studying Hebrew, he's bewitched by the second Book of Samuel, and he invites the clever boy to visit him at the army hotel for mutual exchanges of vocabulary. The man's army mates see nothing odd in his behaviour, which could lead a modern viewer to chuckle at the naivete of military men and their security systems back in the 1940s.

Maybe they were. The script, by producer-director Lynn Roth (a New Yorker and veteran US TV series producer) is supposedly based on a book by Amos Oz, an Israeli author Ms Roth claims is "world-renowned". The movie's final scene indicates that his book was based on the experiences of a possibly real Zionist professor called Avi Liebowitz. He met his British mentor in London, 30 years after the sergeant left Palestine and little Proffy had overcome charges of treachery for fraternising with the enemy.

By then, the sugariness of the fable had become life-threatening. Maybe none of the managers of Israel's film industry funds were younger than 70 when they met Ms Roth. Somehow, she persuaded them that their nation needed a 90-minute spoonful of schmaltz, celebrating the foundation of their nation with peace and goodwill to all, especially the nice Brits who left (unlike the evil Nazis) and the nice Arabs who sat around the marketplace smiling (the only Arabs to be seen) and the nice UN delegates who approved the establishment of Israel (unlike nasty Saudi Arabia etc).

Believe it not, this movie was released in 2007. It's reported that it won an award at a Los Angeles Jewish Film Festival and another in Palm Beach. Now, that I can believe.