It’s an absurd game, throwing characters from different movies together, but Israeli director Eytan Fox gets a chuckle out of it.
“Deal with him,” Fox says, imagining the narrow-minded secret agent in “Walk on Water” meeting the gay army officer from his previous film, “Yossi & Jagger.”
“He’s also a warrior,” says Fox, as if he’s talking to the Mossad man, Eyal. “He’s doing the thing that you believe in, he’s fighting for his country, but he’s gay and he’s easygoing about it, and he’s fun and he’s full of life — as opposed to you.”
Fox considers the possibility, then shakes his head. “We’ve confronted him with something even more complicated, a German grandson of a Nazi.”
Eyal is in his 30s, but he represents a mindset inherited from previous generations — a mindset which Fox argues is both obsolete and counterproductive.
“I think older politicians realize that the younger people in Israel are not really with them, with that old way of thinking,” says Fox. “Everyone realizes that attitudes have to change, otherwise it’s become impossible and unbearable to go on living this way. We’re not victims anymore. We have to check ourselves, and change the way we behave with the world.”
His films opened Friday, March 4, in the Bay Area.
Fox was born in New York and grew up in Israel. His mother, an old lefty whose mantra was “everything is political,” was a city planner in charge of developing Arab neighborhoods and villages in East Jerusalem. Although he was devoted to her, Fox refused to adopt her fears as his own.
But you can imagine his shock when the director called to check on her health while shooting “Walk On Water” in Berlin. “Why are you in Germany?” she asked. “Germany is the enemy.”
She was a little confused, Fox recalls during a recent visit to San Francisco, so he just laughed and said, “Mom, I’ll be back in a week.” She died that afternoon, and he is still trying to reconcile her politics and work with her last words — the words, he believes, of a frightened Jewish immigrant girl in America hearing rumors about the war in Europe.
“Walk on Water” uses the story of Jesus at the Galilee as a metaphor for shedding sins and adopting a new identity. “It’s not only a Christian idea, purifying yourself and making yourself a better person, and when you’re a better person you’re stronger,” says Fox, citing the mikvah.
It says a lot about Fox that he conceived of a movie about transformation at the height of the suicide bombings.
“If I had to be more truthful to my mother’s vision of the world,” Fox muses, “I might have made the ending not as sweet and hopeful and optimistic, because she was not as big a dreamer as I am.”