Walking on Water Review
By David Kempler
Walking on Water and Blood
They're still walking on Water in the Middle East
"Walking on Water" is a poorly named movie. Not as poor as "The Shawshank Redemption" but they should have been able to come up with something a bit better. How about "Right Wing Israeli Softens His Hardcore Stance and Grows as a Human Being". Not very good, eh? Anyway, "Walking on Water" is a smart, fast paced Israeli film directed by Eytan Fox, who made "Yossi and Jagger", which mixed the unlikely combination of Israeli Defense Forces and homosexual love.
This time around Mr. Fox addresses some more very serious issues as well, particularly the mindset of some Israelis towards Palestinians. This drives the film until Fox tosses in a Holocaust involved plot line a third of the way through "Walking on Water". The movie is bent on taking on all controversial subjects at once and almost totally pulls it off.
Eyal (Lior Ashkenazi) is a hard as stone Mossad special agent who kills people without so much as a flinch. His is of the belief that the world is divided into very distinct groups of good and evil. There is no gray in Eval's world. After dusting an undesirable early on, followed by his experiencing an enormous personal setback, he finds himself involved in an old time Nazi hunting expedition. He wants no part of it, preferring to go on knocking off current day threats to his and Israel's existence, but his boss (Gidon Shemer) is an older fellow who still yearns to close the books on all Nazi World War II criminals. Eval is assigned to track down a German who has been hiding for over fifty years. In order to accomplish this goal he poses as a tour guide spying on the Nazi's grandchildren in the hopes of gaining access to the aging Nazi.
The grandchildren are a brother and sister, Axel and Pia. This pair (wonderfully played by Knut Berger and Carolina Peters), are a little bit cookie cutter in their everyone is nice, we love everyone manner. Naturally, Eval finds them to be simpletons and sneers openly at them. As he gets to know Axel his stance towards him begins to soften, much to his dismay. This softening gets a quick slam on the brakes when he finds out that Axel is a homosexual. Eval no longer wants any part of Axel or the case, but he has no choice. When Eval is forced to go to Germany, which is akin to being condemned to hell to Eval, both Eval and Axel are forced to confront some things and themselves and both of them end up quite surprised by the decisions they end up making.
''Walking on Water'' is an earnest attempt to examine the views of some current day Israelis as well as some of the generations in Germany born since the Holocaust. It casts a new vision of Israeli-Palestinian life, especially to those of thus who don't have first hand knowledge of it. More than this, it examines the clash of differing political, religious, and sexual issues. Except for one climactic scene that really rings false and an almost too good feel good ending, it works. Mr. Fox can direct and is worth following up on to see what he comes up with next. "Walking on Water" isn't quite the miracle the title is based on but it is still a small gem.
