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Walk on Water (2004)

Director: Eytan Fox

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From Time Out London

For a film so tightly packed with sensitive themes concerning Israel’s relationship with its recent past, this is a surprisingly light affair that largely wears its politics with ease. Eyal (Lior Ashkenazi) is a Mossad agent who, as the film opens, performs a perfunctory assassination on a Palestinian leader, who is on holiday with his family in Istanbul, and then returns home to discover that his girlfriend, Iris, has killed herself in his absence. Despite this trauma (the suicide, perversely, not the murder), Eyal ignores his superior’s advice to take time off and accepts a new assignment to investigate the whereabouts of an elderly ex-Nazi, Alfred Himmelman, whose unwitting grandson, Axel (Knut Berger), will soon arrive in Israel to visit his sister, Pia (Caroline Peters), who is exercising her liberal tendencies on a kibbutz. Going undercover, Eyal poses as Axel’s driver as a sly means of discovering more about his grandfather’s Nazi past. It’s a pursuit that ultimately leads Eyal to Germany and a Himmelman family reunion… It’s a strange and wild premise that by rights shouldn’t work, relying as it does both on so much coincidence and the narrative get-out clause of a main character who wears the cloak of a secret service agent. Still, an intriguing relationship emerges between Eyal and Axel that forms the emotional backbone of this film and masks its more dogmatic elements. Screenwriter Gal Uchovsky makes a fine effort of exploring the conflict in modern Israel between tradition and modernity, the past and the present. If anything, Uchovsky tries to shoehorn too much into his story, but it’s a smart stab at politically enlightened entertainment all the same.

Author: DC

Time Out London Issue 1819: June 29-July 6 2005

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