Eyal and the identity crisis of the Israeli male
DON'T READ IF YOU DON'T WANT ANY SPOILERS
Every year I teach my high school film students two subjects in Israeli Film as part of the matriculation program. As it's a "personal program", which I develop myself (as is the matriculation exam), I can be flexible, and change subjects every year, as I do with most of the material (just to make it more interesting for me, otherwise which it couldn't be interesting to them).
This year I showed a series of films, mostly from the past decade, within the framework of "the identity crisis of the contemporary Israeli male". I'd often taught subjects connected to women characters in film, and the idea exited me. There seem to have been, over the past 15 years, many films which present this theme, either directly or not.
First a few words about the other films they say, before dealing with Walk on Water.
In Assi Dayan's Mar Baum, Dayan plays an aging version of the kind of hero he once played in films, and which his father symbolized. But here he's dying, and nobody cares. Even when he's dead on the bed, his daughter comes in and takes money for the pizza that arrived.
In both Nir Bergman's Broken Wings and Yosef Cider's Campfire the absence of the father is a central theme. Both fathers died in unheroic circumstances, and the families struggle. In the latter the mother tells the kids to answer, when someone asks for him on the phone, that "he's doing his reserve duty", that is, let's keep the illusion that he's doing what a man should be doing.
In teaching the film, I place Walk on Water into the perspective of that discussion.
Eyal is the kind of Israeli who, a short time ago, would have been the center of the universe. The traditional Israeli male, who has internalized the values of the society, and has the proper abilities, would advance in the army, sign on as a career officer, and retire with all doors open to him, whether politics, business, or whatever. Public tastes were geared to his tastes. He had sexual privileges, to freely harass (just look at Moshe Dayan), and to upgrade his model of wife when she ages.
But this has been changing, for reasons beyond the scope of this post, and this change is reflected in the film. Eyal is unsure of himself, lonely, and alienated. His girlfriend, rather that accept him, kills herself because he "kills everything he's close to". He's losing his potency, as shown in the scene at the shooting gallery, where the young girl soldier consoles him at his inaccuracy as if it's sexual failure.
The entire film deconstructs the traditional image of the Israeli male. Which is why I think, as I wrote on other threads, that I don't think that the filmmakers wanted us to think that Eyal had a sexual relationship with Axel. It would change the focus from the Israeli male in general, to a more gay-centered agenda. The film certainly belongs to any discussion on "queer cinema", but the "agenda" is wider.
(I find it borderline offensive that others have posted that the only reason someone would have that opinion is that straight people can't "get" the winking of the gay filmmakers to gay audience members. The point is, we DON'T know, as anything off screen and unexplained can only be inferred, in any film.)
That is also why I think they found it necessary to provide a happy(ish) ending, to show that there is hope for people like Eyal, and with it, for Israeli society. I think that that message is more powerful than a narrow "see how the macho Mossad agent comes out" focus.
"Do you know, we could go,
We are free;
Any place you could think of
We could be"