Einayim Pekukhoth

I attended the North American Premiere of "Eyes Wide Open" at the 2009 Toronto International Film Festival. This is a somewhat provocative yet understated examination of what it's like to be gay in the Orthodox Jewish world. In his first feature, director Haim Tabakman, working from a Merav Doster script, introduces us to Aaron (Zohar Shtrauss) and Ezri (Ran Danker). Aaron runs a Kosher butcher shop that's been in the family for generations. Ezri is an outsider, already under suspicion for questionable behavior, who enters Aaron's world with possible intentions beyond purchasing a hunk of meat. There's a joke there but I'll resist. The cultural constraints placed upon gays, or anyone who is different, are painfully drawn out as the neighbors decide what actions to take. The Orthodox Jewish community sends in its own goons (enforcers of God?).

This character-driven film is haunting and poignant. Like many foreign films, natural lighting is predominant. The cinema verité style, without regard to shadows, is much more powerful than images in traditional Hollywood movies -- provided the images aren't too dark -- a problem I've seen here with some films. The score is used sparsely, only to punctuate the more emotional moments. The pace is slow and deliberate, while long takes with little dialogue allow the actors to speak with their eyes, facial movements, and body language.

The collision of religion and sexuality is a common theme at every film festival. What is the meaning of restraint? Are we really being true to God if we destroy ourselves in the process?

What happens if you're a married man with children in an ultra-orthodox Jewish community in Jerusalem and you fall in love and lust with a beautiful young man? Couples counseling? A divorce and a move to San Francisco with your lover? No. Something much more dire, as we learn from this simple, powerful first film in Hebrew by Haim Tabakman.

You get a brief period of happiness. Aaron (Zohar Shtrauss) in fact tells his rabbi that he was dead before, and now he feels alive. A beautiful 22-year-old orthodox man named Ezri, (Israeli hearthrob Ran Danker) turns up during a heavy rainstorm at Aaron's butcher shop just after he's reopened it following his father's death. Aaron probably realizes the minute he sees Ezri that he is a temptation. But he subscribes to the belief that the man who lives successfully close to temptation earns greater favor with God. He's come to see life as testing, not joy.

Without much pushing, Aaron takes in Ezri, who's from somewhere else and seems to be a Yeshiva student in search of a Yeshiva, appears (to the viewer, anyway) to have arrived to look up a former boyfriend -- does Ezri represent fresh blood in the ultra-orthodox world? -- and needs a job and a place to stay. Ezri smiles; Aaron never does. Aaron's scenes with his wife Rivvka (Tinkerbell) are dutiful, affectionate, and incredibly dull. He pushes Ezri away at first, but as Ezri becomes a part of his life, learning how to do the work of a butcher, his attraction becomes stronger. After a number of physical contacts and a trip to the country to immerse themselves together in a lake, it's Aaron who comes after Ezri, wordlessly, after they've loaded a big animal carcass into the cooler. Tabakman and the writer Merav Doster create a world in which you know exactly what people are thinking when they only stare at each other. The values and the desire to override them are equally clear.

The way Aaron's community deals with misbehavior is illustrated by a women who works nearby, who continues seeing a man she loves even though her father has promised her to someone else. Aaron is called upon to go with a group to threaten the man and the woman. Aaron warns them that if the matter fell into the hands of the "purity police" they'd be roughed up and the flat would be turned upside down.

The beauty and the melancholy of Eyes Wide Open is that it doesn't glorify either gay experience or orthodox Jewish life and yet it coolly shows the beauties of both. You can see the closeness and security of the life, the simple joys of celebratory meals (at Aaron's house, where Ezri is invited for them), of joining hands and singing there or in Talmud class, where the men chant and bang on the table. Aaron's physical pleasures with Ezri are equally simple, and intense, with a passion lacking in his ritual under-the-sheets couplings with Rivvka.

Soon Aaron is missing appointments at home -- and not caring; closing the shop for no reason. There are no secrets in this community, and someone knows where Ezri comes from. He's a bad man, someone reports. "He was sent away from his Yeshiva. He did too many mitzvahs." Someone sees something. Threatening voices in the alleyway and the pashkavils (orthodox posters used as mass communication) begin declaring "there is a bad man in our community."

The film, with its simplicity, its drab realistic settings and its leisurely, Rossellini-like pace, achieves a kind of quiet perfection and memorableness despite subtitles that are occasionally out of sync and an obtrusively ominous electronic sound track. The material is explosive, and the filmmakers and the actors have known well enough not to mess with it too much.

The film, whose Hebrew title is 'Einaym Pkuhot,' premiered in May 2009 at the Cannes Film Festival's Un Certain Regard series. Screened at Cinema Village in NYC February 16, 2010, where it opened February 5.

Eyes Wide Open is the fantastically well played drama, eventually coming to mutate into a tale of taboo romance, of two men of differing ages and places in life formulating a bond that is much to the acknowledged risk of either party; the suspicion of those close to them and the eventual disdain of everybody else in the community. The film opens in the pouring rain, the back-streets of Israel acting as a run down and somewhat decrepit setting for middle-aged husband and father of two Aaron Fleischman (Shtrauss) to finally return to his butcher shop following the grief he has suffered born out of the loss of his father. Aaron is in a tough situation, the rain is heavy and there is little in the way of protection; the padlock on the shutter to the entrance of the shop proving an obstacle in the way made only possible to get rid of by resorting to a last-ditch effort of brute force to bash one's way through and in. Such an introductory situation goes on to encapsulate that of the film's; a predicament gradually, slowly getting worse before pushing mutates into shove and the conventional methods of a particular process must be put aside to deal with the scenario in a more pachydermatous manner.

Aaron goes on to take over his father's business; a butcher's business he helped his father out with here and there whilst much younger but a father now whose presence is strictly limited to that of memories and in photographs. Enter Ezri (Danker), a student in his early twenties whom has recently been flitting from place-to-place whilst trying to keep up with his studies; a man whom will come to play a large part in Aaron's life in the near future. Initially somewhat muted when on screen together, Aaron hires the young man as an apprentice in order to show him the basic routines of butchery; each hammer blow that comes down out of Ezri's swinging of the cleaver bringing about a terrific 'thump' on the wooden board. His freshness at wielding such a tool and the might with which he is operating it, what with his other hand in such close proximity, going on to neatly epitomise the danger the film will go on to carry - a 'close-to-all-but-disastrous-results' sensation which will surely come about if something goes wrong both in this new role and if certain revelations cannot be kept from the masses.

The men share some common ground just as much as the film enjoys establishing them as the binary opposites to one another. As a student, Ezri has committed most of his life to studying, whereas Aaron has done anything but although confirms that he would certainly like to. Ezri's wincing at the sight of what it is a butcher does is simply part-and-parcel of life to Aaron whereas Aaron's devout attention to religion is exemplified during a process of prayer in a local place of worship, something in stark comparison to Ezri who merely sleeps through such a gathering as everyone else of his ilk appear thoroughly into proceedings. When Ezri first enters the butcher's shop, he is rightfully wet-through due to the aforementioned rain; Aaron has had time to dry and the distinction between the men in their appearance in this regard strikes us. It is only much later on during which both men have arrived at a local spring, as their relationship develops, when the pair of them at once become as wet as Ezri was during that initial confrontation, the marking of Aaron in a similar manner symptomatic of his changing feelings and shifting onto a plain similar to that of Ezri in terms of akin homosexuality.

It is established Aaron is not a man whom is particularly scared to stand up to authority or a predominant voice, especially one within the community when he challenges a local Rabbi, who was an old friend of his father's, on certain theological views. Aaron's going against the distinguished norm here is later a characteristic he very much takes on to a further level in his coming together with Ezri. During another sequence, the verbal highlighting of Aaron's actions as that of dangerous or would-be scornful within the community is put across during a car journey; the Rabbi's pointing out of another young local boy and the subsequent labelling him as a "trouble-maker" is another example of where the nature of ill-advised relationships with others gets you within the community; his crime being the pursuing of a girl out of love with tendencies to stalk. As loose connections grow into greater unifiers, so does the film as the substantial and engrossing tale it is; Aaron's slow disenchantment at his family and life as a husband is highlighted in the bringing together of two single beds whilst with his wife, and yet it is inferred that very little happens. This could be seen in binary opposition to the two male leads, whom both share common ground in that when they initially meet, the pair of them are in the process of slipping out of a close bond or powerful tie with a gentlemen that meant a lot to them: Ezri's with a male partner we later hear him leave whilst on the phone and Aaron with his grief at loosing his father.

Director Haim Tabakman, running off of a Merav Doster screenplay, brings his characters together and explores in an absorbing and riveting fashion their back-stories plus behaviours before having that equality ruptured in a refreshing and dramatically involving way. Where many recent Isreali films have documented the past or certain other difficult, grizzly issues on the minds of Isrealis or Isreali communities, namely the Lebenon-set wars in films ranging from Beaufort to Waltz With Bashir, Eyes Wide Open explores another issue of immense controversy in the form of homosexuality and turning away from one's faith for personalised happiness within the said culture and does so wonderfully well.

A simple story, gently told, in a stark setting of almost medieval religiosity.

I'm middle-aged gay European agnostic from Christian background and found this film enchanting and entertaining although sombre and downbeat.

The 'purity police' were scary talibanesque types: you will comply or else. I did not know about such compliance methods in Judaism.

The intolerance towards the 'seducer' gay man was ugly, so far removed from secular/reform attitudes around me.

The main character (the butcher Aaron) was unfulfilled after siring four children and still having a loving and beautiful wife, felt 'dead inside'.

But was that from the recent loss of his father, or some other reasons than just lust?

I just saw this at the Minneapolis-St. Paul film festival. A powerful, relentless film that seems to imply, if I can trust my instincts, that "falling in love" is a spiritual phenomenon devoid of gender considerations. Now, I may disagree with this personally, but the director makes such a powerful case for it that it is entertaining to watch.

Also implied is the message that repression produces the opposite effect in the long run...

In the film, a super-fundamentalist butcher in an ultra-orthodox Jewish neighborhood meets and falls for another man, despite the social and even physical danger. The scene in which the two meet is shot in such a way that even we heterosexuals in the audience can understand. The young apprentice enters from a pouring rain with a cherubic, earnest look on his face and, for just a second, what the director is trying to say echoes in everyone watching.

The scenes between the butcher and his plain yet somehow beautiful and patient wife become more tense and more poignant, even as they become more and more muted.

Overall, this was an excellent film. I gave it four out of five on my ballot.

Things to watch for: Pool of Siloam, frank but not disgusting sex scenes. A-