Where Inglourious Basterds took place in the mind of Quentin Tarantino, Walk on Water takes place in the real world. Our protagonist Eyal (Lior Ashkenazi) is a Mossad operative who is so incapacitated by grief after his wife’s death that the agency puts him out on the farm, to hunt down an ageing Nazi war criminal and “get him before God does”. Since the criminal has been allegedly dead for decades while living in a convenient South American country before allegedly dying of old age, Eyal must pose as a tour guide and extract the necessary information from the war criminal’s two grandchildren Pia and Axel – the first presumably rejecting her German heritage to live in a kibbutz and the other coming over the weekend for a social visit.
Alex and Eyal could well in a particularly dark road trip comedy. On the road to scenic spots in Israel and Palestine, the duo discuss music, sunbathe in the Sea of Galilee, argue about the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the post-war German generations’ war guilt, and the Holocaust – among other fine conversational subjects one should never bring up on a tour and on a long road trip with a stranger in a strange land.
It’s not enough that one is a resentful son of death camp survivors and the other is a grandson of a war criminal; the film adds on another wrinkle of sexuality – the gruff Eyal is a macho, no-nonsense man with homophobic tendencies while the liberal peacenik Axel likes to take more than passing glances at attractive men in the street. As they say, this is going to be such a fun and enlightening male bonding experience!
Despite its rather heavy themes, Walk on Water coasts along effortlessly by focusing on the human interactions between its three central characters and the way they bond with each other (or not). Part revenge movie, part road trip movie, the film manages to combine its two genres and come out as more than a sum of its parts.
Walk on Water will be screened on 12 Sep 2011, 7.30pm at the 19th Israel Film Festival (in Singapore) at The Cathay Cineplex. The festival runs from 7 - 13 September 2011.