“The Bubble” | Uniting the Mideast, one hot actor at a time
“The young kids in Israel don’t care if you’re Arab,” said Israeli writer-director Eytan Fox. “You’re cute, you’re a good actor, they like you.”
It wasn’t always that way.
“When I was a kid in Israel in the 1970s or early 1980s,” he said, “the thought of a young Jewish girl putting up a poster of an Arab actor was unheard of.”
Yet Yousef “Joe” Sweid, the Palestinian star of Fox’s latest film, “The Bubble” (opening Friday at the Varsity), has become an idol to young Israeli girls, largely because of his appearances on a television soap opera.
“You walk with him on the street, and these girls are chasing him, and he thinks it’s ridiculous,” said Fox, when he brought the movie to the Seattle International Film Festival last spring. “I told him it’s pop culture, mass culture, whatever you want to call it, but it’s a political achievement.”
A runner-up for best picture and director at the festival, “The Bubble” is a same-sex Romeo-and-Juliet tale about a Palestinian boy, Ashraf (Sweid), who falls for an Israeli reservist, Noam (Ohad Knoller). After they first see each other at a West Bank checkpoint, Ashraf follows Noam to his Tel Aviv apartment, and they try to maintain a relationship despite inevitable complications.
The film’s title refers to the bubble that Noam and his friends maintain within Tel Aviv. Although Fox’s previous film, “Walk on Water,” became the top-grossing Israeli film internationally, “The Bubble” was a hard sell to the Israeli Film Fund and the cable company that ended up financing the picture.
“They had questions about how are you going to make the serious tone and the humor work together,” he said. “I told them, ‘I don’t understand you guys. This is our life, we people in Tel Aviv especially. We’re very concerned about what’s going to happen to Israel, about the war, the occupation, the future of Israel, and we deal with these issues constantly.
” ‘But then we wake up in our comfortable, pampered Tel Avivian homes, we go to our special espresso cafe where we have our special coffee, special croissant, and we go to film at night, and we go to theater, and a sushi bar, whatever, and then on the other hand we read, talk, create, we go to demonstrations. But our lives are not depressing or very political, and we are certainly not Palestinians, who live in these terrible conditions.’
“So I want to bring this unique, crazy - I think - mixture to the screen. The young people live this very special life, which they’ve created for themselves, this kind of world, this kind of bubble, which enables them to think they’re living in a normal place and having a normal life.”
Israeli/Palestinian relations have played a role in most of Fox’s movies and television work. He credits his late mother, an American Jew who moved from the United States to Israel in 1967, with inspiring parts of the film that address the recent past.
“She was a city planner,” he said. “Her thing was to help the Palestinians living in eastern Jerusalem, and the villages surrounding them. So all those stories of playgrounds [which turn up in flashback form within the film] are true autobiographical stories of Mom and me.”
Both of his leading actors have appeared in previous Fox films: Sweid in a small role in “Walk on Water,” Knoller as one of the two leads in “Yossi & Jagger.” Knoller was a last-minute replacement for a miscast actor.
“The people at the network said I was crazy to go with Ohad,” said Fox. “They said he was too tough, too chubby at the time, not cute enough, not sexy enough, not gay enough. But we took him to a nutritionist and put him on a most extreme diet. He went with a personal trainer every day, and he lost 10 kilos, and we cut his hair in a kind of sexy way, with highlights. I’m very happy with what we came up with - and he came up with.”
The actors had no problem with playing gay characters, mostly because attitudes toward homosexuals have changed in Israel. Fox acknowledges that his co-writer, Gal Uchovsky, “a journalist who dropped into films,” has also been his partner for 19 years.
“When I was growing up, there was no visibility for gays,” said Fox. “The man in ‘Walk on Water’ (a Mossad assassin) was the man you were supposed to be: straight, strong, tough, warrior, survivor, whatever - ‘I’m going to protect my family.’
“Now there’s an option. A male can be tender and needy and emotional - and gay. It doesn’t mean you’re less of a man, or less of an Israeli man. I’m proud to be part of that change. It’s sad that this doesn’t affect Palestinians as much as I would want it to.”
John Hartl:
johnhartl@yahoo.com