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The Bubble
Directed by Eytan Fox
Written by Eytan Fox and Gal Uchovsky
Starring Ohad Knoller, Daniela Virtzer, Alon Friedman, Zohar Liba, Tzion Baruch
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There's a scene in Eytan Fox's 1990 short film "After" (alternatively titled "Time Off," available on Boy's Life Five) in which a group of young Israeli recruits -- including a closeted gay soldier -- about to be shipped off to Lebanon flirt with teenage American girls in a Jerusalem cafe. Fox introduces the scene with the 1964 Supremes hit "Where Did Our Love Go," and the effect is perfect: young, naive desire conflates with silly, romantic Anglo pop-culture, producing a mixture of exhilaration, incipient dread, and potential tragedy.

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ox expanded on these themes in his 2002 hit Yossi and Jagger, about a love affair between two Israeli soldiers (the more spirited of whom is nicknamed after the Rolling Stones lead singer), whose love ends in tragedy. His 2004 Walk on Water also turned on the axis of a charged male/male relationship -- an undercover heterosexual Mossad agent and a gay German man whose grandfather is an infamous Nazi war criminal.

Now, in The Bubble (Ha Buah), Fox leaps forward in both narrative structure and emotional depth and gives us a film that's as psychologically unnerving as it is emotionally potent.

The Bubble, described flippantly, is a disconcerting cross between Sex and the City and Romeo and Juliet. The basic plot device -- a young gay Israeli radical falls in love with a mostly apolitical Palestinian -- feels pat at first. But as written by Fox and his partner Gal Uchovsky, the film grows multilayered and speaks to a host of vital cultural and political concerns, catching us unawares and unprepared.

The Bubble is probably the best gay film of the year so far. It never stints on its commitment to thinking about sex -- and also nationhood, loyalty, friendship, resistance, political ennui, desire, and political and sexual anger.

Noam (Ohad Knoller) and his circle of thirtysomething friends -- Lulu (Daniela Virtzer), Yelli (Alon Friedman), Golan (Zohar Liba), Shaul (Tzion Baruch) -- live in the counterculture "bubble" of Tel Aviv where they hang out, meet in cafes, discuss the newest music, take drugs, go to raves, and -- determinedly if haphazardly -- protest the occupation. While there's always tension in the air, Fox's tone here is a mixture of Friends and Sex and the City. The Israeli characters' lives not only revolve around pop-culture artifacts, but pop culture provides the map they use for locating themselves in the world. As with, say, Friends, the lives of the protagonists here offer successions of pleasant shallowness interspersed with moments of authentically-realized emotions and experience. This all starts to change when Noam hooks up with Palestinian immigrant, Ashraf (Yousef "Joe" Sweid). They "meet cute" at a checkpoint, a detail that deftly displays Fox's ability to push the ironic envelope without losing tight control of his narrative. An evening of casual sex turns into a more serious romance.

Fox plays eagerly with the myriad, often obvious, contradictions here. Ashraf is an alien in his own land, but Noam and Ashraf's love is more acceptable in Tel Aviv, and strictly forbidden in the latter's home in the territories.

Some of the characters attend a Tel Aviv production of Martin Sherman's 1980 play Bent, about gay lovers who are in a concentration camp. While the viewer's first reaction is to feel hit over the head with the obvious -- yes, gay love is forbidden and punished -- the play's contradictory reverberations grow gradually apparent. Is Fox analogizing the Palestinian territories to a Nazi concentration camp? What are Noam and Ashraf's responsibilities to their own families and friends? To one another?

The stark questions recall Isaac Bashevis Singer stories such as "Blood" or "A Crown of Feathers"-- but Fox's artistic methods here are closer to those of Douglas Sirk, whose Hollywood melodramas such as All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life boldly used the artifices of art and culture to expose the deepest problems faced by his characters.

Almost all the Israeli protagonists here are not only trapped in the "bubble" of counter-cultural Tel Aviv, but also in the very artifacts of culture that they are using to make sense of their lives. As The Bubble builds to its surprising conclusion -- with enough twists of plot and emotions to keep viewers dislocated -- Fox poses complicated, vital questions to which he supplies few answers. What begins as a tale of star-crossed lovers becomes something quite different.

Eytan Fox has emerged as one of the most interesting Israeli filmmakers of the past decade, and with The Bubble he establishes himself as a world-class master. But as a "gay film" -- whatever that category has come to mean -- The Bubble is a sign of maturity and deeper understanding of the connections between sex and politics, desire and action.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com