Share on:

Sugar and Spice and Everything Nice

Eyes Wide Open

directed by Haim Tabakman

Once I kvetched with two friends, one a Jewish gay man, the other straight and Catholic (lapsed). The first complained, “Why do they have to say ‘a nice Jewish boy?’” The other pointed out that it’s the same with “a nice Catholic boy.” Ditto a nice Japanese girl. Niceness is a communal expectation. And that’s a tie that binds.

Israeli filmmaker Haim Tabakman’s first feature, Eyes Wide Open, is about two such nice men in an orthodox quarter in Jerusalem. Aaron (Zohar Strauss) is a butcher, married with kids. Outwardly, his life of kinder, kitchen, synagogue lacks nothing. One rainy day, a young man drops by his shop to borrow a phone. One lingering look of the camera reveals he’s gorgeous, corkscrew curls in progress and all. It turns out he needs a job and a place to stay. Aaron hires him and gives him the room above his shop. As Aaron teaches Ezri (Ran Danker) the job and the two spend most of their days together, their physical closeness grows into a yearning for emotional and sexual connection. Soon the beautiful stranger’s past catches up with him; he’d been expelled from his yeshiva. And the neighbors begin to talk.

What shocks is not that these two fall in love; it is the reaction of the community, with moralistas like medieval witch-hunters barging into people’s homes if they are seeing the wrong people. Theirs is not the kind of social repression that pretends something doesn’t exist. It’s the kind that systematically and persistently stamps out undesirable behavior. All for saving your soul and their children’s souls.

Eyes Wide Open is a beautiful film. Grays and blues dominate this determinedly unpicturesque milieu; pattering rain becomes percussive twinkling in a subtle soundtrack. The measured drama unfolds in an almost tangible quiet reminiscent of Tarkovsky’s Stalker or Nostalgia. But it is all a bit, um, orthodox. When is the last time you saw two guys making love in the missionary position? In fact, this film could have been about forbidden heterosexual love in ’40s Japan, ’60s India or just about anywhere else in a recent, pre-Almodovar past. Have you noticed how rare it is to see a man’s face in ecstasy in mainstream movies? Here Ezri’s eyes wander toward the ceiling, lips parted, as Aaron, face unseen, lies on top of him. You’ve seen this before: He is a girl.

Aaron’s rabbi tells his Talmud-study class that there is no virtue in turning down every sensuous delight since God put man on this earth to enjoy them. Still, he slaps Aaron when the latter declares his joy in the illicit love. In the end, the “community” wins. Boy dumps boy. Like Nostalgia, the film closes in water: Aaron goes back to the well where he had bathed with Ezri at the beginning of their relationship –– to be cleansed of his lust? Of betrayal? By the time his thinning top disappears underwater, I am no longer caring, so disappointed by the familiarity of it all.

It’s the kind of familiarity that leaves a nagging question: Could this film have been made at all had it truly offended the very community whose excesses it aims to expose? Social repression is scary when self-censorship –– also known as niceness –– becomes so ingrained as to appear natural. Hollywood might draft Tabakman to direct a straight romance. And that would be a blessing: state funding no more.

–– Rika Ohara