Walk on water

                                                 Walk on water by Eyton Fox

            In walk on water Eyal is an Israeli secret agent who is first seen in the middle of a mission where he assassinated a high-ranking member of Hamas. He gets back to Israel after the mission where his boss and co-workers congratulate him on another successful mission. After he shares a drink with everyone he heads home where he finds his wife has committed suicide. He finds a letter next to the bed and he sits down to read it when his boss shows up to help him.

            A month later Eyal returns to work eager to get back to the job he has been working on but the agency determines that he is not fit for duty yet so his boss assigns him to find an old Nazi war criminal and bring him in before he dies. He must pose as a travel guide for the grandchildren of the Nazi and try and find out where the man is hiding from them. He must pick up one of the grandchildren and take him to see the other grandchild who lives in a kibbutz or an Israeli commune.

            The two grandchildren and Pia and Axel quickly become friends with Eyal as he goes on day trips with them showing Axel around the country and taking Pia out for dinner. It is revealed that the reason Axel is here to visit his sister to try and convince her to come back home for their fathers seventieth birthday. Pia is outraged at this and refuses to return with him. She eventually tells him that she left home because she overheard their father talking to their grandfather on the phone and discovered they helped him escape and hide from the law.

While the three of them are out to dinner one night Axel finds out about a party going on that night in town. Pia and Eyal join him in the club and Eyal discovers that it is a gay club and he is visibly disgusted by the realization that Axel is a homosexual. Eyal asks to be removed from the assignment because of his homophobia but his boss insists that he finish the mission. Unable to convince his sister to return to Germany with him Axel leaves to go home alone. Pia stays at her kibbutz continuing to work and live there as she has for the past few years.

            Eyal flies to Germany to meet Axel and they spend time together eating dinner and going out to the bar. While walking in the subway a group of thugs attack Axel’s transsexual friends and Eyal comes to the rescue beating them up. Alex tells Eyal that he wished he had killed those thugs because they are a detriment to society. Axel invited Eyal to his father’s birthday party at the villa. His bringing an Israeli to the birthday party visibly disturbs Alex’s parents but they don’t say anything and act polite. After the cake is served Alex’s grandfather comes out to surprise his son for his seventieth birthday. Axel confronts his mother and storms off to find Eyal but he has already left to go meet his boss who is staying in town. Eyal tells the boss that the old Nazi is here in town and at the family’s villa. He says they can get him in a car and take him to the airport easily since there is no security but the boss tells him they are not hear to bring him to trial but to kill him. The boss gives Eyal a case of poison to use on the old man.

            Eyal returns to the villa and sneaks up the old man’s room. Axel sneaks up behind Eyal and watches him as he fills the syringe with poison and moves towards his grandfather. Eyal finds himself unable to kill the old man and when he turns around he sees Axel watching him, he rushes out of the room leaving Axel with his grandfather. Axel turns off the oxygen tank and kills his grandfather. He returns to the room to find Eyal siting on the bed teary eyed. He tells Axel that his wife told him in the suicide note that he kills everything he comes near and he can no longer kill anymore; he proceeds to break down in Alex’s arms. We next see Eyal two years later married to Pia with a small child living on the kibbutz together. He and Axel are good friends now and he recounts a dream involving both of them in his email to Axel.

            I find that the film deals with a few different issues that exist within the movie. Those are tolerance and acceptance of homosexuality and forgiveness of the past. Homosexuality is a theme that comes up in the film through the character Axel. Eyal is surprised and angry when he finds out that Axel is homosexual because they spent a long time together and did things like shower together naked at the beach. At first Eyal wants nothing to do with Axel and requests to be transferred from his mission because of this. But after he visits him in Berlin he learns that Axel’s orientation is unimportant to their friendship.

            In the film Eyal holds some resentment over the Germans because of their history with world war two. Even though they had nothing to do with it and they are peaceniks as he put it, he still harbors ill feelings over the role the Germans played over a half a century ago.  At the end of the film he comes face to face with a Nazi who caused the death of his family along with other Jewish families and yet he could not bring himself to kill the man. Was the ultimate revenge to have this man exist in a world that considered him a monster and forced him to hide in the darkest recesses of the world? Or was it making another point in the killing of the old Nazi by his own grandchild? I believe that this represented the German people taking power away from the Nazis who tainted their history to the point they do not like to reflect back on the past. This allows Axel and Eyal to forge a closer friendship since this along with the earlier encounter in the subway eradicates any doubts in Eyal’s mind about the good intentions of the German people. I believe that if Eyal could forgive the Germans for their atrocities over a half a century ago then maybe one day he can come to forgive the Palestinians for their violence and come to question why they commit these acts.

            I really enjoyed this film because it deals with several serious themes but it also has some pretty funny moments and it really shows you how this character Eyal who was such a hardened killer at the beginning of the film comes to find his tender side with the help of Axel and Pina. I did feel that the film did not deal much with the theme of the Palestinian/ Israeli conflict, which I guess I just, expected from an Israeli film. But overall it was definitely a great film that continued to impress me right up until the heartwarming ending.