It’s way too easy to compare Eyes Wide Open, director Haim Tabakman’s film of a homosexual affair between two ultra-orthodox Jewish men in Jerusalem, to Brokeback Mountain, but that would be unfair. Comparisons like that are always dismissive and the film that was released later usually comes off sounding like a cheap Canal Street knock-off. But more than that, the comparison is inaccurate.
Eyes Wide Open is much more about restraint, and if I were the compare and contrast type, I’d say it has more in common with Merchant-Ivory’s Remains of the Day than the Ang Lee film. But I’m not. Okay, I will say this, Zohar Shtrauss turns in the most compelling portrait of repression and restraint that I’ve seen since Sir Anthony Hopkins, and that’s no small compliment, friends.
So there, we’ve gotten that out of our systems. Now on to this film.
Soon after Aaron (Shtrauss) re-opens his father’s butcher shop, a stranger appears, the mysterious, smoldering, equally orthodox and excruciatingly handsome Ezri (Ran Danker). But Ezri is also a bit of a free spirit. He smokes. He draws. He skinny dips. Aaron finds himself drawn to Ezri, but his strong religious center prevents him from acting on this attraction. For a while. But eventually, love (or lust, it’s for you to decide) will not be denied. What sets Eyes Wide Open apart from other modern forbidden love stories is the kind of pressure Aaron experiences. Until the climax, it’s all subtle and internal (again, Schtrauss, amazing). When Aaron’s wife offers him a plate of food after his tryst with Ezri and tells him knowingly, “Enjoy,” the subtext and their expressions say more about where Aaron is emotionally than 900 lines of histrionic dialogue ever could. Aaron is from a culture that believes life is to be endured, not enjoyed, and especially not sexually enjoyed, and super-especially not to be sexually enjoyed with a member of the same gender, and it is his internal conflict, more than his conflict with his wife or his community, that is ripping him apart. When he is finally confronted by a sympathetic rabbi and Aaron explains why he can’t tell Ezri to leave (“I was dead, and now I’m alive.”) it’s a tear-inducing, heavy-heart moment.
Aaron’s restraint is mirrored in Tabakman’s direction and Merav Doster’s screenplay. (There is a misstep or two, but why dwell on those.) One example of the respect these two have for the intelligence of their audience is how they don’t linger on the fact that Aaron has only recently buried his father, made known to us when Aaron visits his grave covered with fresh soil. It’s not that that image is subtle, it’s not; it’s that we know Aaron’s grief is part of his emotional discombobulation even though it is never verbalized.
Eyes Wide Open opens at Cinema Village in NYC this Friday, Feb. 5. If you’re around, show your support for provocative, intelligent cinema and go see it. Then come back here and let me know what you think.
