By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO –Eytan Fox’s Yossi and Jagger (2002) holds a special place in Israeli film history as the first commercially successful mainstream movie about gay lovers. It won two Israeli Television Academy Awards and many prizes at various LGBT film festivals around the world. Its tale of two Israeli male soldiers furtively developing an intimate relationship with each other within an otherwise homophobic platoon challenged the macho stereotype of the Israeli male soldier by legitimating the martial and patriotic credentials of homosexuals.
Though not yet out of the closet, the flamboyant Jagger (Yehuda Levi) futilely pled with the more conventional Yossi (Ohad Knoller) to share their secret with the members of their platoon. In the end, Jagger died in Yossi’s arms, a casualty of a firefight with terrorist infiltrators on the border between Israel and Lebanon. Devastated by his loss, Yossi attended the shiva to console Jagger’s parents, but never told them about his romance with their son because he was preempted by Yaeli (Aya Steinovitz) naively claiming that she was his girlfriend despite Jagger’s rebuffing her advances.
Yossi occurs ten years later. In the interim he has become a cardiac specialist, working long shifts, healing hearts even though his own has become emotionally sclerotic. He remains discreet about his sexual orientation, but rumors about it circulate at the hospital. To his obvious discomfort, an attractive nurse named Lina (Ola Schur Selektar) tries to strike up a romance with him, and fellow doctor Moti (Lior Askenazi) involves him in a three-way with a woman. Yossi prefers to stay at home watching gay porn movies and surfing the internet for a hookup with another gay man. During a chat session with a potential partner, he emails a picture of himself that was taken when he was less paunchy and more clean-shaven. At their meeting, his date frankly complains that it was fraudulent of Yossi not to send a recent photograph and exhibits no interest in him beyond a one-night stand.
By coincidence, Yossi notices that Jagger’s mother Varda (Orly Silbersatz Banai) has an appointment for her annual checkup at his hospital. After conniving a way to examine her, he offers her a ride back to her home and eventually musters the courage to visit Varda and her husband and disclose his relationship to their son. His catharsis founders on their refusal to believe that their son was gay.
At a cul-de-sac in his life, Yossi embarks on a road trip to the Sinai. Along the way, he picks up a group of soldiers heading towards Eilat. He is simultaneously intrigued by his passengers’ acceptance of their one gay comrade Tom (Oz Zehavi) but alienated by their immaturity and taste in music. He decides to stay over in Eilat since Jagger and he had planned to vacation there after getting discharged from the army, but refuses to dive into the vibrant partying and hotel pool that are at his immediate disposal. Instead he tellingly immerses himself in reading Death in Venice, and like its tragic protagonist inwardly yearns for a handsome youth he outwardly does not pursue. Tom detects the longing in Yossi and eventually cracks the shell which he has built around himself. Fox has crafted a moving portrait of a bereaved man who slowly realizes that love is possible after grief.
Yet Yossi seems stuck in a time warp. The Knesset decriminalized same sex acts in 1988 and approved of admitting openly gay, lesbian, and bisexuals into the military in 1993. In 2006 the Israeli Supreme Court recognized same sex marriages performed abroad. (Marriages with one or two Jewish partners within Israel are under the jurisdiction of the Chief Rabbinate.) Tel Aviv, where Yossi resides and works, has been designated by Out Magazine as “the gay capital of the Middle East.” Yossi’s reluctance to confide in his platoon that he was gay was more plausible in 2002 than his same stance towards his medical colleagues is now. How Tom can be so open about his sexual orientation, but never admit it to his parents is equally anachronistic. Both Yossi and Tom should watch Eytan Fox’s hit film The Bubble (2006). They might find its depiction of the vibrant gay scene in Tel Aviv liberating.
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Lawrence Baron recently retired from being the Nasatir Professor of Modern Jewish History at San Diego State University. He is the author of Projecting the Holocaust into the Present: The Changing Focus of Contemporary Holocaust Cinema (Rowman and Littlefield: 2005) and editor of The Modern Jewish Experience in World Cinema (Brandeis University Press: 2011). He may be contacted at lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com