The Bubble

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
2006

The Bubble
Eytan Fox
ISRAEL, 2006
Hebrew, Arabic 117 minutes Colour/35mm
Production Company: Uchovsky Fox/Ronen Ben Tal Productions/Metro Comunications/Amir Feingold Productions
Executive Producer: Moshe Edry, Leon Edri, Dudi Zilber, Micky Rabinovitch
Producer: Gal Uchovsky, Ronen Ben Tal, Amir Feingold
Screenplay: Gal Uchovsky, Eytan Fox
Cinematographer: Yaron Scharf
Editor: Yosef Grunfeld, Yaniv Raiz
Production Designer: Oren Dar
Sound: Itay Alohav, Gil Toren
Music: Ivri Lider
Principal Cast: Ohad Knoller, Yousef “Joe” Sweid, Daniella Wircer, Alon Freidmann
Production: Uchovsky Fox

Downtown Tel Aviv’s Sheinkin Street is a sexy, cosmopolitan urban landscape—cafés, alternative record shops, gay bars, student protests, the works. It could not be farther away from the nearby reality of occupied Palestine. Gifted Israeli director Eytan Fox pricks this “bubble” in his new film. It is a breathtakingly urgent, convulsively funny and then impossibly tragic love story.

Fox is Israel’s most interesting and courageous young filmmaker. His taboo-busting films all carry a sense of danger. Yossi & Jagger portrayed a homosexual love affair in the Israeli army; Walk on Water was a buddy movie about a Mossad agent and the gay grandson of a Nazi. In The Bubble, Fox and his collaborator Gal Uchovsky tackle the toughest subject of all: Jews, Arabs and Middle East politics. And they use the oldest and best trick in the book, bringing us into the worlds of lovable and imperfect characters about to undergo transformation.

Lulu (Daniella Wircer) lives with two gay guys, brooding music lover Noam (Ohad Knoller) and flamboyant café owner Yali (Alon Friedmann). The roommates’ days and nights are spent in typical slacker fashion—hanging out, watching TV, getting laid. They are secular and progressive, but not overly political.

Everything changes when Noam meets Ashraf (Yousef “Joe” Sweid), a cute and intense Palestinian guy, at a checkpoint. Noam is on reserve duty and Ashraf is helping a woman forced to give birth at the roadside—not the best circumstances for a meeting, but something connects them. When Ashraf shows up at Noam’s apartment, a powerfully erotic love affair begins. Ashraf becomes part of their group, while Lulu and Yali also fall dramatically in and out of love. One almost believes that the two men could inspire change as symbols of peace, but their affair is already doomed. The awful violence of life outside the bubble envelops them, gradually making their affair one of painful, tragic irony.

Fox pulls no punches. Ineffective Israeli peace protestors and self-serving Jihadists are both scorned. True happiness is seen as a luxury only for Jews and Muslims able to get out, to London or New York. When I first saw The Bubble, I wondered whether the film might be overstating the case. Recent events have shown Fox and Uchovsky’s analysis to be painfully accurate.
—Noah Cowan