Walk on Water

Josh Haimann

Walk on Water, by Eytan Fox is about an Israeli assassin Eyal, who is very good at his job making people disappear. One day after returning home from a successful hit he finds his wife Iris has committed suicide and left a note blaming him for driving her to do so. Broken but not stirred he tries to down play it and return to work, but a month later, and still refusing to receive trauma therapy, Eyal is assigned by his boss to pretend to be a personal tour guide for a young German named Axel, who is visiting his sister Pia on a kibbutz. Eyal isn’t happy with the assignment because its not a very serous or challenging one. Eyal is to spy on both of them, in the hope that Hansel and Gretel, as he calls them, will lead him to their ex-Nazi grandfather. Eyal has difficulty accepting Axel's liberal attitudes, open homosexuality and sympathy with Palestinians, but when he follows Axel to Germany to attend his father's 70th birthday, Eyal discovers that there is a lot that both he and Axel have to learn from each other.  In one of the first scenes where Eyal starts to open up to Axle, they sits in a motel restaurant in Germany and Eyal describes how, as a sick game, Israeli students on German exchange trips would confront randomly selected old people with the question: “Where were you when my family was burned at the camps”? Axel suggests Eyal  play the same game then and there, but the only person present old enough to have been alive during the second world war turns out to be Menachem. There are several ironic instances in the film. Eyal's distrust of all things German, ingrained in him by his mother, is challenged directly by Axel, who, two generations after his own grandfather sent an entire community to the death camps, is not only openly gay, making him a potential target of Neonazis, but also as disgusted as Eyal himself by the ideology of the Third Reich. Walk On Water is a strangely lacklustre affair, with a bland visual aesthetics. Yet despite these poor aesthetics, it more than makes up for in a willingness to dip its toes into controversial political waters. I can’t say whether I’d call it a love story or a bad action film but either way I don’t think I watch this movie again.