AICE ISRAELI FILM FESTIVAL: This austere Israeli story about the conflict between duty and desire has an advantage in its unusual setting – an ultra-orthodox Jewish quarter of Jerusalem. Depictions of this milieu are not entirely new in Israeli cinema (a few years ago saw the droll comedy-drama Ushpizin, for instance) but they don’t appear to be commonplace. Ultra-orthodox Jews don’t go to the cinema or own DVD players or TVs, which reportedly didn’t stop this drama stirring controversy upon its release at home.
The film opens in the pouring rain (water soon proves its favourite metaphor) as Aaron (Zohar Strauss) desperately tries to break the locks of a shuttered up property. This is the butcher’s shop that belonged to his recently deceased father. Soon afterwards a younger orthodox Jewish man appears in the shop, initially asking to use the phone. It turns out he’s been expelled from a 'yeshiva" (annoyingly not translated in the subtitles but a type of religious educational institution). He asks for a job and a place to stay and after initially turning him down, family man Aaron relents and makes space for Ezri (Ran Danker) to stay on the premises temporarily while he takes him on as an apprentice butcher.
Initially they make an awkward couple. Conversation is stilted – Aaron is the gloweringly silent type – but gradually they get to know one another, with Ezri revealing an artistic bent via the sketchpad. The first obvious sign this relationship has the potential to be transgressive occurs when they go away together on a trip into the countryside and bathe in a pool together (more water imagery). A physical relationship beckons – which in a traditional, ultra-conservative community such as theirs can only mean trouble. And despite their attempts to keep their affair secret, trouble is indeed what they get.
While the film’s title evokes Stanley Kubrick, the theme of duty versus desire and instinct gives Eyes Wide Open something of an Ang Lee flavour in theme if nothing else (bearing in mind the butcher’s setting it might easily be nicknamed Brokeback Mutton). However, what this slow-moving and very serious tale lacks – at least until its second half – is any sense of urgency, some variation in mood (a joke or two might have helped) and a protagonist capable of inspiring empathy, if not sympathy. When the two men are together, their relationship has physical heat but it’s hard to feel any warmth between them on any other level.
It’s not so much that Aaron is unlikable as so taciturn and self-contained that he’s very difficult to get to know. It’s true the labels 'God-fearing’ and 'religious’ might be stuck to him, but these are hardly meaningful character descriptions. They apply equally to everyone else in their tight-knit community, where everyone else seems to know their business.
Watching the film I had the sensation that, with a few shifts in cultural detail, I might easily have been viewing a story from Iran. The band of religious students who roam the streets as self-appointed moral guardians in the second half seem like Jewish equivalents to the morality vigilantes who stalked the streets of Tehran during the Ayatollahs’ revolution. This may well be the intention of writer Merav Doster and director Haim Tabakma and it gives the film a shot of electricity in its finale that's lacking in the first two thirds.
