Sublet (dir. Eytan Fox, 2020)

Israeli director Eytan Fox’s latest film, Sublet, which is currently screening in film festivals prior to its theatrical release here in the United States this summer, captures the soul of Tel Aviv. That kind of intimate encounter is achieved both through cinematographic details, like panoramic shots of curved tidal pools rolling onto the beaches of Tel Aviv by day and by night, as well as through the central gay characters, Michael and Tomer, at the heart of this gorgeous two-hander. As viewers, we experience the city both through the fresh perspective of professional tourist Michael (John Benjamin Hickey, in a perfectly calibrated performance) and the more familiar perspective of Israeli native Tomer (Niv Nissim, who hits all the requisite notes of sexiness, jaded youthful humor, and depth). The movie opens with Michael, a 50-something New York Times travel writer, landing in Tel Aviv for an assignment over a five-day visit. When he arrives at Tomer’s apartment to sublet it for the week, the 20-something filmmaking student has totally forgotten that his subletter would be arriving that day, setting up a standard odd-couple scenario that turns out to be so much more than that. Sublet is the finest and most delicate May/December semi-romance in a far-flung location since Sofia Coppola’s 2003 Tokyo-set Oscar winner (for Best Original Screenplay), Lost in Translation.

Later in the movie, when Tomer’s mother (Miki Kam) asks Michael about his impressions of Tel Aviv over a quiet dinner at her home in the kibbutz near the end of his stay, he replies that the city is a unique mixture of intensity and laidback vibes, which is actually a great description of the film itself as well. Because Tomer’s bicycle gets stolen during the film’s early scenes, we experience the city — along with Michael and Tomer’s relationship — on foot at ground level as Tomer becomes a tour guide for Michael, and so the film unfolds with exactly the pace that such a relationship would. What’s special about Sublet as a piece of gay cinema is its cross-generational component. That element is handled in a sensitive manner that’s quite rare in gay movies, achieved through subtle moments that are fairly easy to miss: Michael’s glance of realization when Tomer’s mother mentions that she’d had him with a sperm donor and raised him alone, for instance, or Tomer’s gradual recognition of the hardships that gay men of Michael’s generation have faced over time.

Sublet also isn’t afraid to face more difficult truths about contemporary gay culture and why plenty of younger gay men today can struggle to find stability and contentment. After Tomer invites over a hot guy from a hookup app for a potential threesome midway through the movie, we catch on long-partnered Michael’s face a dismissive glimpse of disappointment as he excuses himself from the scene, despite his clear feelings of desire and physical interest. It’s such a deft momentary expression for an actor to convey, and it reminded me of a comment that I heard the actor/director John Cameron Mitchell make a while back, about how younger gay men have been poorly conditioned by the instant gratification of apps like Grindr, to the extent that any attempts at actually getting to know somebody (or even enjoying the pleasures of foreplay) just get totally omitted these days. Although Tomer claims to like the quickness of those sexual interactions that require “no drama,” Michael senses otherwise and so begins to nudge the younger man gently in another direction.

I was fortunate to see John Benjamin Hickey starring on stage as Henry Wilcox in Matthew Lopez’s epic two-part play The Inheritance on Broadway in late November of 2019, several months prior to the shutdown of theaters prompted by the global Covid-19 pandemic in mid-March of 2020, which occurred just a couple of nights before that play was scheduled to close its Broadway run. Hickey portrays a similar character in Sublet, someone who lived through the AIDS crisis, lost his first boyfriend to the disease, then survived to weather the cultural changes of the ensuing decades, only to end up overseeing the lives and antics of a younger generation of gay men in New York City, providing them with support and good counsel as an older gay man. Eytan Fox relies on Hickey’s gently timeworn facial features to ideal effect here, so that we, too, can feel the span of time that the character has endured, enabling a kind of closeness via Hickey’s performance that winds up feeling more internal, rather than being focused solely on age or the distinctions of external appearance. This is probably the movie’s most distinguishing emotional aspect, and Fox and Hickey both seem to be aware of that.

Niv Nissim’s performance as the younger and somewhat disenchanted Tomer is equally profound on many levels, believably inhabiting a character who doesn’t want to be tied down to strict definitions of sexuality or long-term monogamous relationships, nor even obligatory “happy endings.” He’s happier having more fleeting encounters with a wide variety of people, sexually and otherwise, while making art through unconventional horror films with the help of his young actor friends in Tel Aviv. (One of his student films that he shares with Michael was perhaps a little too clearly inspired by Rosemary’s Baby.) Tomer's predilections provide an important contrast to Michael’s own relationship with his partner David (Peter Spears) back in New York, with whom he face-times on his cell phone and laptop at a couple of strategic points in the movie. They argue and discuss, in particular, whether they should pursue having a child via a surrogate again, after their first attempt to do so went tragically wrong, as we find out during a deeply moving and matter-of-fact scene late in the film.

Where the movie goes from that point in its final act is better left unsaid, simply in terms of the audience’s emotional payoff. And while the film’s central pair of characters do move on and resolve their issues on a number of levels, where exactly Michael and Tomer will go in the wake of their encounter remains open-ended, even if it’s clear that the encounter has changed both of them in key ways as they return again to the familiar grooves of their individual separate lives. I’ve seen and loved all of Etyan Fox’s films, which collectively provide an essential document of gay Israeli life over the past three decades, but at this particular point in my own life as a gay man at age 47, Sublet is his movie that’s meant the most to me on an immediate emotional level, and also the one that I’ve related to most closely. I watched the film twice over the past couple of months, and both times I was moved to tears by the exact same scene. It’s obviously the scene that the director intended to make his audience cry, as a result of all that’s been expertly held back by the actors up to that moment, and then all that’s finally allowed to reveal itself more fully in the brightness of an airport’s waiting area, a space of anonymity and transit.

The Bubble (dir. Eytan Fox, 2006)

It’s time again for my annual pre-Provincetown Film Festival blog post.  I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a film that I saw at the festival back in 2007, Eytan Fox’s The Bubble.  The celebrated Israeli director has become known for his gay-themed films like Yossi and Jagger and Walk on Water, which focus with authenticity and complexity on relationships between men.  His films are always bold, too, keeping the sexual aspect of those relationships well within focus.  The Bubble follows suit, this time exploring a romance between an Israeli and a Palestinian man.  Several films have taken this particular “star-crossed lovers” approach in a gay Israeli context (the most recent being Michael Mayer’s Out in the Dark), but The Bubble still feels to me like the most successful and genuine effort of its kind.

The film’s title refers to its setting — the city of Tel Aviv, a relative bubble of acceptance and liberation within a war-torn desert of political strife.  More specifically, it refers to the area of the city surrounding Sheinkin Street, similar to trendy, gay-friendly Old Compton Street in London’s Soho district.  Inside this socially tolerant bubble, the movie’s four central characters emerge:  Noam (Ohad Knoller), a sweet, quiet record shop employee who also works as a military check-point guard; Yali (Alon Friedman), Noam’s flamboyant best friend; Lulu (Daniella Wircer), the free-spirited straight female roommate of the aforementioned men; and Ashraf (Yousef Sweid), the Palestinian guy with whom Noam falls in love.

Noam first meets Ashraf under very intense circumstances in the film’s dramatic opening scene.  Ashraf is on a bus heading into Tel Aviv when the bus is stopped at an Israeli military check-point where Noam is working on guard duty.  During the inspection of the passengers, a pregnant woman goes into labor, and the baby must be delivered right in the middle of the road.  The frantic tension of the scene is palpable and believable.  After they exchange some subtle but knowing glances, Ashraf retrieves Noam’s dropped identification card and later takes it to Noam’s apartment to return it to him.

Eytan Fox incorporates a number of smart moves into the film, one of which occurs during the first night that Noam and Ashraf share together on the roof of Noam’s apartment building.  They’ve vacated the apartment for the night so that Lulu can spend it privately with the handsome if malign magazine editor she’s been dating.  The camera intersplices naked close-ups of Lulu and her date in bed together with identically intimate close-ups of Noam and Ashraf sleeping together up on the roof, as if to say:  young people do enjoy sex, and there’s not much distinction between gay and straight in that regard.

Ashraf decides to stay on for the duration after that first night he spends with Noam, partly because he has a chance to be himself in Tel Aviv.  He begins to work as a waiter at Orna and Ella, the restaurant where Yali is a manager.  Meanwhile, Lulu becomes increasingly involved with a group of Israeli anti-occupation activists who seek to find peace and common ground with Palestinian young people, even organizing a rave on a beach where the characters can all come together in what feels like a kind of paradise for them.

Of course, it’s not a paradise for very long.  Ashraf doesn’t have a government permit that would allow him to remain in Tel Aviv, and his conservative Palestinian family expects him to marry a woman and have children.  Further drama ensues, bringing about Noam’s separation from Ashraf.  In a very funny sequence, Yali and Lulu perform an Israeli pop song in drag in an attempt to rouse Noam from his bed and his depression after the seeming breakup.

Yes, Yali embraces his queeny side, and no, there’s nothing wrong with a stock gay character who can drop hilarious and witty one-liners about Take That, Judith Butler, and Michel Foucault.  In fact, all four characters are finely drawn and acted, and their dialogue is lucid and clever for the most part.  The screenplay does contain some overly convenient and melodramatic twists, all of which I’m willing to overlook because of the film’s emotionally precise inner dynamics.

This emotional exactitude is a fairly rare quality in movies that focus on relationships between gay men.  Noam and Ashraf are both treated with an understated sense of dignity throughout, just two everyday guys who have found themselves deeply and irreversibly attracted to one another.  Not to mention the obvious chemistry between the two actors, which helps to foster some of the most moving scenes of physical closeness between men that I’ve ever seen on screen.

And that closeness works to devastating effect at the film’s climax, during a tragic scene that’s foreshadowed by some dialogue between Ashraf and Noam early in the movie.  The morning after they’ve first had sex on the rooftop, Noam says in Hebrew, “We were explosive,” and explains to Ashraf that the word “explosive” can be used as slang for when something’s cool.  Their climactic finale that fatally echoes those words (along with a visual cue from Martin Sherman’s canonical 1979 play Bent) is filmed in a burst of light with a 360-degree, hyper-kinetic tracking shot, the perfect directorial decision for a heartbreaking scene that might otherwise be impossible to render.

Also to his credit, Eytan Fox doesn’t leave the viewer with any unearned sentimentality or simple answers in the film’s voiceover denouement (alongside a beautiful cover of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” by Ivri Lider in the movie’s closing credits).  Certainly for gay men surrounded by the ongoing Israeli/Palestinian conflict, love is forced to try to persist amidst violence and persecution.  The Bubble creates a realistic fantasy that approximates what exactly that struggle must feel like.