By Doug Strassler

We first meet Augustine - a kitchen servant, the title character of director-writer Alice Winocour’s impressive debut feature – in the middle of a major fit while working a very highbrow dinner. It’s a convulsion so severe I expected her character to die. But Augustine (played by French singer Soko) survives, albeit with one shut eye and a paralyzed half of her body, submitted to the inspection of Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot (Vincent Lindon) at Paris’ Salpêtrière psychiatric hospital. Augustine isn’t completely the story of its suffering heroine once Charcot enters the picture, and while both prove fascinating characters, this very promising film left me wishing that Augustine had provided a bit more character study for its leads.

Photo courtesy Music Box Films

Charcot, a real-life neurologist whose work directly influenced Sigmund Freud, quite quickly sees in Augustine a pawn to use in his quest to earn more research funding for Salpêtrière. He diagnoses Augustine with ovarian hysteria (a panacea diagnosis that will be familiar to those who saw Sarah Ruhl’s play In the Next Room, or The Vibrator Play – or its more neutered film adaptation, Hysteria). Charcot uses hypnosis to induce public seizures in Augustine, questioning the line between experimentation and punishment. Is he a puppeteer? For that matter, is she really as susceptible to him as the good doctor thinks she is?

Winocour asks her audience bear silent witness to Charcot’s treatment of Augustine, which eventually evolves into a transactional relationship in which he rewards her participation with a private room and dresses. Being a patient of his affords Augustine a better life than she has ever known as a member of the working class, and she knows he needs her as much as she desires a cure for her malady. While medical treatments could often be brutal, as Winocour painstakingly makes clear, Augustine’s worst fear is for another patient to catch Charcot’s attention.

But there is also an underlying attraction between the two which feeds the power play. In one sequence, Charcot insists that Augustine stroke his pet monkey, leading to a rhythm in which this odd couple ends up rubbing against each other (Charcot, for the matter, is married to a Constance, very subtly played by Chiara Mastroianni, an upper-class woman who uses her status to help propel Charcot’s career.) Later on, while spoon-feeding soup to Augustine, it becomes apparent that she now wields more influence in their relationship. Both Lindon and Soko offer skilled portrayals of two in an ever-changing relationship without ever judging their characters’ deeds (or mis-deeds).

In spite of all this, I wish Augustine were a little more…something. I wish it cut deeper or ran darker, exploring more of the impulses experienced by doctors treating patients with psychosexual disorders. Augustine is quite feminist in tone and has all the merit of an Edith Wharton novel, but lacks the requisite commentary on class – Augustine may be taking advantage of her situation, but Charcot will always be in a position with more options than his patient. I also wish the film’s climax, inevitable and earned, was actually just the springboard to something greater and more revelatory. Still, these are benign wishes. Augustine remains worthy of observation.

It’s always nice to see a work of art that values the art of creation – particularly the act of observant writing. Such is the case with In the House, the latest satire-cum-thriller from French auteur François Ozon. Adapting Juan Mayorga’s play, House is a clever and engaging window into the double-edged sword that is potential, as it focuses on both sides: those who have yet to make good on it, and those who never really did.

Photo courtesy Cohen Media Group

Germain (Fabrice Luchini) is a bitter high school literature teacher married to his art-dealer wife, Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas). (In a highfalutin’ reference, the school is named “Lycee Gustave Flaubert,” named for the author of Madame Bovary, one of the more perfect works of literature in any language.) Germain has nothing but contempt for his pupils, but one lower class student, Claude (a curiously mercurial Ernst Umhauer), takes advantage of Germain’s mundane writing exercises (“How I spent my weekend”) as a vicious attempt at voyeurism, describing the middle-class family of a peer in details both cunning and cutting.

Claude’s innate talent unearths a seemingly buried spark in Germain, who takes Claude in as a means of improving (exploiting?) the young man’s gifts. He encourages Claude to pursue his writing and further infiltrate Rapha’s (Bastien Ughetto) family, fanning the flames of Claude’s obsession with Rapha’s mother, Esther (Emaneulle Seigner), and also echoing last decade’s Swimming Pool. And Germain abets Claude’s pursuit even further, crossing lines he knows better than to cross. Ozon teases us, having Germain refer to those observed by Claude as “fictional characters,” thus establishing a meta tone for the film that cuts down on its ultimate danger and opens the door for amusement and ridicule, even if it posed at a target as easy as the French class system.

House is part social commentary, part unabashed soap opera, and the fun comes in Ozon’s ability to push both subgenres to the fullest while simultaneously entwining the tenets therein. The film is an indictment of our modern-day obsession with tabloid culture, but not a condescending one – Ozon’s technical crew (including cinematographer Jérôme Alméras and editor Laure Gardette) loop us in on the action rather than ever distance us from it. We’re all guilty members of the party; we’re the Kit Kat Klub audience at the end of Cabaret rather than the shut-out Kay Corleone at the culmination of the first Godfather.

Ozon, whether knowingly or not, also invokes other recent films ranging from Adaptation to Atonement in its look at the writer as master, God-like manipulator. Both Germain, and especially Claude, learn how to pull strings in their storytelling as a way of appealing to their audience. And Ozon also deliberately evokes other movies, especially Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers from the 1950s, aided by a pitch-perfect performance from Luchini and a tongue-in-cheek one from Scott Thomas. who support Ozon’s premise, Umhauer, too, is perfect as the poker-faced youngster pulling the strings. Of course, it’s inevitable that the director eventually adopts all the characteristics of his storytelling leads (and somewhat cripples House with an off-course ending). Do these characters sometimes feel like puppets, engineered to follow a path of Ozon’s own design? Sure they do. But their puppet master is just having some fun here. Let him.

In the House is playing at Landmark Sunshine Cinema and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.

We are fortunate to have been spared Spike Lee’s take on the Jackie Robinson story, which surely would have been spiteful; emphatic about race grievance and loaded with other Spikey tangents. But Brian Helgeland has made a superb tale about Robinson’s groundbreaking desegregation of baseball through the machinations of Branch Rickey–and about American spiritual history and destiny. The issues and emotions have a beautiful clarity.

42, titled after Robinson’s player number (retired for all teams by the Major League Baseball association yet worn by players every April 15th–Jackie Robinson Day), commemorates Robinson breaking the game’s color bar in 1947 as the first Negro playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Helgeland depicts this world-changing risk as a cultural story–not simply one man’s life story. Instead of biographical depth, 42 sustains the same benevolence as the MLB’s memorial; its lively and vivid narrative goes through the arduous steps of a social and moral revolution.

More than a baseball movie, 42 is a folktale touching on the spirituality evidenced in Robinson (played by Chadwick Boseman) and Dodgers’ General Manager Rickey (played by Harrison Ford). Seeing baseball as the medium of social change; its practice and rituals are understood as basic to America’s sense of capability despite prevailing social divisions. That explains Helgeland’s elastic sense of class. Robinson steps into the roughneck world of sport possessing higher personal principles. He and wife Rachel (Nicole Beharie) are already upwardly mobile; they need only the income and recognition that white Americans take for granted.

Now let’s get rid of the narrow-minded complaint about Hollywood race stories always unequally pairing history’s black sacrificial figures with white cohorts. Helgeland’s even-handed vision of the Rickey-Robinson revolution enlarges it, taking in different aspects of America’s racial reality. Not merely the Jackie Robinson story, 42 relates tandem efforts and transformations by Rickey, Negro sports writer Wendell Smith (Andre Holland), assorted teammates (many brief, perfectly etched characterizations from Max Gail’s captivated retired manager, Chris Meloni’s virile Leo Durocher to Lucas Black’s affable Pee Wee Reese) and the crowds who fill the stands. All profiles in courage.

The back office functioning behind America’s public face rarely gets shown but 42’s story fortunately reveals that it appropriate significance and appeal, primarily through Harrison Ford. Projecting established magnanimous decency, Ford puts Rickey’s risk-taking and persistent urging in perfect balance to newcomer Boseman who portrays Robinson’s circumspect heroism. This isn’t a timed, harmless Black man; he’s self-assured yet resentful of those who want to make him humble. (Jeffrey Wright has played this Poitier complex but Jamie Foxx, Denzel Washington never has). Boseman’s wary intelligence conveys deep pride, a forgotten aspect of black America’s gradual civil rights evolution. 42 revives it.
The way Helgeland balances Ford/Rickey’s courage represents the modern audience’s guileless ignorance of history and the period era’s attitudes. The young black actors–all ebullient, optimistic, determined–represent Blacks’ hopes while the familiar Whites personify fears. When 42 explicates these details, it surpasses Steven Spielberg’s morally compromised Lincoln.

Cinematographer Don Burgess makes 42 the most beautiful movie of 2013 so far. He photographs sunlight and water (when Robinson finally showers with his white teammates) with radiance. Nothing in Lincoln’s political contrivance is as resonant as Rickey confessing “Something was wrong at the heart of the game I loved and I had ignored it.” Kushner-Spielberg’s Lincoln never admitted such sorrowful complex. Lincoln pretended that political opposition was the essence of America’s moral progress when in fact it was only a power struggle; 42 is deeper and more honest in its display of how Americans changed through accepting skill, humanity, sympathy.

This is a better approach to history than George Lucas’ lame Tuskegee Airman tribute Red Tails. Helgeland has made a film totally without cynicism. Cynicism is what ruined Lincoln; cynicism was at the core of Kushner and Spielberg’s self-congratulatory arrogance–which was why liberals overrated it. Will Obama-era audiences appreciate 42’s richness with its deep understanding of how hard-won compassion has greater everyday effectiveness than the rule of law? The splendor of ball field effort? Or a silhouetted fatherly embrace? These images test fairness within the glory of nature without the falsity of The Natural or Field of Dreams like no movie since Robert Aldrich’s The Big Leaguer.

I’d like to describe more of 42’s wonderful scenes such as the shots of Robinson rounding the bases, focused on his “42” uniform imprint like an existential Bressonian icon, but viewers should discover such beauty for themselves. Rickey and Robinson unite over the idea of being “built to last” by doing the right thing. Whether or not 42 conquers the box-office, it is built to last.

Commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day, 50 Children: The Rescue Mission of Mr. & Mrs. Kraus, the new documentary by Steve Pressman, recounts the story of Eleanor and Gilbert Kraus. Some may know of this Philadelphia couple who helped rescue, as the moving film’s title indicates, fifty young children out of Austria during the Nazi occupation in 1939. Six-time Emmy-winner Alan Alda narrates the harrowing work, which also includes readings from Eleanor’s journals – a precious artifact – by the actress Mamie Gummer. (Pressman and Alda were also on-hand at a preview screening last week in the HBO building to celebrate the film.)

The documentary chronicles, with clear-eyed narrative, the hurdles the Krauses encountered both from the American government as wells as in Berlin and Vienna, where the Jewish couple had to go to complete their rescue act. As much recent literature has pointed out, then-president Franklin Roosevelt was not completely for saving the Jewish prisoners under Nazi rule. 50 Children also examines the anti-Semitism prevalent in the United States at that time. The Krauses also encountered fellow Jews angry at them for rocking the boat instead of remaining still and silent.

The most harrowing moments in the Pressman’s film arrive when the Krauses do in Austria: taking the children from their parents was a necessary evil. Losing their children meant hopefully saving their lives. To Pressman’s credit, he maintains the complete pathos of this situation without ever veering into manipulative territory. Nine of the surviving children – now septuagenarians and octogenarians – are also interviewed in 50 Children. They recognize that the Krauses gave them life, and remind us that rescue missions involve two parties – those who must escape to survive, and those more fortunate ones willing to take them in (we New Yorkers were recently reminded of this at a more local level during and after Hurricane Sandy just last fall). There are many messages to be found in this worthy doc, but that one that rings the clearest is this reminder: we’re all in this together.

Further information about 50 Children can be found at www.hbo.com.

Following the IFC Center’s very canny “The Films of Stanley Kubrick” series, comes the documentary Room 237 which sums up the Stanley Kubrick cult. Comprised of theories spoken by five different Kubrick nerds over an assemblage of movie clips and diagrams by director Rodney Ascher, Room 237 pretends to dissect Kubrick’s 1980 movie The Shining. Ascher’s film—a true mockumentary if ever there was one—is named after the Overlook Hotel suite where little Danny sees Kubrick’s most disturbing visions due to his gift for “shining.” Every nerd wants to shine.
But Room 237 is an even more disturbing vision of post-cinephilia asininity. The theories proposed by the five unseen nerds and elaborated by Ascher, (whose fondness for eccentricity suggests Escher), are not just wildly different from each other, they demonstrate a current style of cinematic illiteracy that has replaced critical thinking.

Actually an embarrassment to the highbrow Kubrick, Room 237 shows that the Kubrick cult consists of that breed who like to think they think. However, the hypotheses presented, (and seemingly validated by use of actual—pirated?—Kubrick clips), resist rationality.

I’ve long realized that Kubrick’s stature among film geeks certified a paradigm shift from the Hitchcock era when the legendary master of suspense—and of montage—inspired a different, popular breed of film enthusiast than Kubrick whose esoteric, post-WWII misanthropy fed recent generations of kiddie nihilists who, considering themselves especially smart, responded to his stiff (non-sensual, thus anti-Hitchcockian) compositions. (They’re now the Fincher/Nolan kids.) Recall Kubrick’s tracking shots from Paths of Glory and Lolita to Full Metal Jacket that were more deterministic than Max Ophuls who tracked to observe transitory life while Kubrick’s steadicam tracks bore down and confined life’s possibilities. No Kubrick film exemplified this determinism like The Shining, a horror movie about existential claustrophobia that seems angled to mean much more. But whatever it is exactly, (and that fastidious Stephen King adaptation is surprisingly, unexpectedly sloppy), brings the Kubrick cult of Room 237 to weird ecstasies of obsessive overthinking.

Watching Room 237 you can’t avoid the problem of contemporary film criticism shallowness. Unlike Wim Wenders’ Room 666, a celebration of cinephilia where a range of filmmakers discussed their inspirations at the Cannes film festival, Room 237 is strictly concerned with the fantasies produced by nerds’ uneducated responses to the Kubrick myth and the irrationality of The Shining.

Fans seem unable to recognize the film’s failings and so try to make virtues of its mistakes. “Kubrick often in many of his movies would end them with a puzzle so he’d force you to go out of his movies saying ‘What was that about?’” So says one zealot who responds to cinema the way a child reacts to a video game, trusting that a manufacturer cares about his response.

Another nerd says “[Kubrick] is like a megabrain for the planet who is boiling down, with all of this extensive research, all of these patterns of our world and giving them back to us in this dream of a movie.”

Sorry to say but this inanity redounds to the global reach of Roger Ebert’s TV reviewing. Room 237 doesn’t raise one’s appreciation of The Shining (cue laff track), instead, it confuses response. It features reenactments of Kubrick placing a Calumet baking powder canister, paranoid shots from All the President’s Men, shots of Tom Cruise cruising in Eyes Wide Shut and, for seriousness, there are even purloined images from Schindler’s List to justify the suggestion that Kubrick was actually expounding upon timeless examples of genocide. It is Ebert’s pretense of “criticism” that moves these nerds to insist that The Shining must be important because it is more than just a horror movie. Their theories concentrate on gaffes and continuity errors which is exactly the sort of “criticism” that Ebert made available to couch potato cineastes.

One enthusiast claims “Its contradictions pile up in your subconscience.” Another recidivist viewer claims “When you see things over and over again their meanings change for you…He’s playing with your acceptance of visual information and also your ignorance of visual information.” This is hero-worship, not analysis. Another nerd says “We are dealing with a guy who has a 200 IQ.”

Reverence for Kubrick overwhelms any understanding of The Shining. It is symptomatic of today’s celebrity veneration—the flip-side of the feeling of nothingness that makes nerds bow down to the likes of Nolan, Fincher, Soderbergh and Kubrick. So they fantasize about The Shining’s supposed profundity as when one professes, “We all know from postmodern film criticism that the meanings are there whether or not the filmmaker is aware of them.” This is the mess that criticism has come to. Fake erudition causes another to muse, “Why would Kubrick make the movie so complicated? Yeah, why did Joyce write Finnegan’s Wake?” This goofy exchange shows they don’t know the difference between literary and cinematic erudition. These Shining geeks don’t even know the hotel story of Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, a truly profound expression of memory and desire.

They ignore the human significance of Jack Nicholson telling his son Danny “I would never hurt you.” In this warped cathexis, the cynical gotcha coincidences carry hidden importance that means more than the clear, apparent behavior and imagery.

The Kubrick cult dispenses with traditional humanist notions of art appreciation. They prize Kubrick for The Shining’s horror movie ugliness, perverting Diane Arbus’s twins, turning an elevator into a bloody diluvium (although as Pauline Kael observed “No one takes an elevator in this movie anyway”). Without any schooling in visual or literary interpretation, the Kubrick cult is left to bizarre fantasizing. One nervously giggles “I’m trapped in this hotel. There’s no escape, there’s like this endless loop.”

So we’re subjected to ideas about Kubrick’s face subliminally photoshopped in clouds, an actor’s erection, a Rodeo poster turned minotaur and a Dopey dwarf decal. Ascher subjects his witnesses to humiliation that’s no better than his unidentified steal from Murnau’s magnificent Faust, where a silly narrator adds Kubrick “found the Holocaust of such evil magnitude that he just couldn’t bring himself to treat it directly.”

When Ascher isn’t holding Kubrick obsession up to ridicule, his presentation yet implies the same credibility the Internet gives fanboys. Like Internet criticism, Room 237 resembles the kind of conspiracy theory mania that kooks used to put on single-spaced mimeographed sheets and pass out on street corners.

The ultimate nerd testimony says “In your own life, your point of view is being altered by your study.” But this isn’t study which means to examine, this is mere obsession. Room 237 is another confirmation of the end of cinephilia.

The trouble with tragedy is that it is harder than one might think for it to elicit emotion from a third party. Sometimes, an audience remains at a distance despite the harrowing event befalling the characters in front of their eyes. And so it goes with The Silence, an impeccably acted but ultimately un-engaging mystery.

Silence, adapted by Baran bo Odar from Jan Costin Wagner’s novel and denoting Odar’s feature directorial debut, is a then-and-now flick. We first see two men track down an eleven-year-old girl in a field; one murders her while the other looks on. Nearly a quarter-century later, another young girl vanishes in what appears to be a copycat crime, stringing together the lives of grieving family members, detectives, and killers alike, all of whom are broken in their own, not unfamiliar ways.

If Silence so far sounds fairly by-the-numbers, that’s because it is, in every sense of the genre, procedural. Odar’s script hits all the expected notes in dealing with the aftermath of a grisly crime, but the net result is less than symphonic. Loss and estrangement permeate pretty much the lives of everyone attached to this case, whose resolution seems pre-ordained thanks to the film’s overt preamble. David (Sebastian Blomberg) is the detective who becomes obsessed with solving the current case as a means of distracting himself from his own recent widowhood. Burghart Klaussner’s Krischan, meanwhile, cannot let go of the earlier, unsolved crime despite his retirement. “It was a real pain in the ass,” glibs Elena (Katrin Sass) about the loss of her daughter 23 years ago, a wound that Sass shows us still bleeds internally even as Elena maintains a stiff upper lip. Even the two murderers we first meet, Peer (Ulrich Thomsen) and Timo (Wotan Wilke Möhring), remain affected by their crime as they go about their lives.

Silence is smart until it isn’t. The notion of the past constantly nipping at the heels of the present is not a revelation. And the idea of suffering and proximity to danger fails to cast a suspenseful shadow over his film, even as an innocent young child injures himself on a trampoline. (We get it: harm lurks around the corner for everyone. Let’s not get too carried away.) And it is eventually a mistake to focus on the inner lives of the film’s tangled web of characters instead of making the central mysteries more engrossing. Still, Odar wrestles wonderful performances from his ensemble. Blomberg, Möhring, and particularly Sass are all quite credible in rendering people whose lives have become untethered, showing what it is to be lost in plain sight.

Sympathy comes for all, but empathy has a more difficult time entering the room. Odar’s portrayal of quiet mourning is eventually too, well, silent for its own good. All of these characters behave in ways that are psychologically justified, but they suffer from a lack of exploration. And most are stoic, so while Odar steers clear of melodrama, there’s also a lack of any kind of dramatic potency to shepherd his story along. And since we know early on whom the perpetrators of at least one crime are, there is little suspense (the thorough explanation by one character of another’s motive provides an unnecessary denouement as well).  One roots for the film and its talented players onscreen and behind it, but Silence is a murder mystery that is all too clinical. Like the events of the film itself, sometimes bad things happen to good people.

The Silence is currently playing at Cinema Village.

VAN SANT AND DAMON’S PROMISED PROPAGANDA

Gus Van Sant must really be out of imagination (or horniness) to make the drab, politically slanted Promised Land. That’s two phony films in a row for Gus, following the 2010 Restless. Promised Land takes on the fracking controversy about drilling for gas in underground shale deposits, using Gus’ Good Will Hunting star Matt Damon as a gas company stooge trying to trick Pennsylvania farmers into leasing their land. As an exposé of the fashionable dilemma, the film is unconvincing politically and fraudulently sentimental about the average American’s skeptical response to technological progress.

When Damon, as corporate shill Steve Butler, tries hoodwinking rural folk (“‘Fuck you money’ is the ultimate liberator” he tells a landowner), his dishonesty recalls George Clooney’s self-pity in Up in the Air. Damon’s a shrewder actor, so he eschews Clooney’s false empathy and portrays a man who corrupts the American Dream while refusing to lose the American rat race. This frick-or-frack quandary turns Promised Land into a reverse-Capra movie in which the little people convert the bad protagonist—reviving his buried good instincts.

But Steve’s transformation is half-ass; his heart isn’t in the job anyway, only his contempt—the phony common-folk stance the Environmental Left prefers. In Promised Land, the anti-fracking controversy seems to be about class superiority as much as about the environment.

Van Sant, Damon and co-screenwriter, co-producer and co-star John Krasinski (portraying Dustin Noble, an antagonistic environmentalist) pretend that political position is more important than complicated truth. Using pretzeled logic, these filmmakers twist their story into unbelievable shapes to make the self-righteous point that Americans’ greed outweighs their truest values. Easy for millionaire filmmakers to say.

The love triangle between Steve, Dustin and local schoolteacher Alice (Rosemarie Dewitt) lacks the gay sexual tension typical of Van Sant; this is just a propagandistic gimmick relying on the sentimentality of white-picket-fence heterosexual normalcy. (You can hear sheep bleating behind Steve’s confidence game, and an American flag is used as backdrop.) Van Sant, Damon and Krasinski present what amounts to anti-fracking propaganda without deciding which side they are on. It’s as if the industrial revolution—and unbiased cinema—never happened.

Celebrated indie film ‘Beasts of the Southern Wild’ confuses pandering with empathy

Documentary ‘Fracknation’ debates ‘Gasland,’ ‘Promised Land’ and the greenshirts—and wins.

By Gregory Solman

Credit Guy Raz

At 34 years of age, Yossi may have a promising career going as a Tel Aviv cardiologist, but when it comes to matters of the heart for himself, the man is in stasis, a lonely heart who can be seen in Eytan Fox’s Yossi downloading porn and even seeking out online encounters (albeit with a significantly younger photo of himself). Yes, Yossi’s heart is still beating, but he doesn’t seem to know exactly what to do about it.

Yossi is the sequel to the 2002 Israeli film Yossi and Jagger, also directed by Fox and both times starring the subtle, sensitive Ohad Knoller. The first film told the bittersweet story of the clandestine relationship between Yossi, an Israeli Defence Force commander, and Lior, his brash seconds-in-command officer. While moving, the first Yossi was a relatively primitive film, narratively straightforward but emotionally compelling. It was, however, a crucial milestone in the portrayal of gay life in the Gaza strip.

A decade later, Yossi is single. He may not be closeted, but his life appears to be hermetically sealed, locked in a kind of self-exile. Yossi doesn’t tell us too much about what has happened in the intervening decade, but the sad-sack look on Yossi’s face and his nebbishy appearance fill in between the lines. The doctor deprives himself of fun, initially refusing a night out with a fellow doctor celebrating his imminent divorce. An encounter with a middle-aged patient also stirs something within the doctor, and provides a nice callback for those who have seen the original (for those who have not, I have been deliberately vague in this review). I do wish that writer Itay Segal had extended this rich portion of the film. While perhaps lacking in originality – it manages to summon emotions from crucial scenes in both Born on the Fourth of July and Brokeback Mountain – it acts as a catalyst, sending Yossi on a literal and metaphorical journey that pushes both borders and boundaries.

Yossi hits the road during the film’s second half, and at a rest stop, he encounters some restless soldiers who’ve just missed the bus back to their hotel. He offers them a ride, and, amid the young men’s dismissal of Yossi’s preferred music, the film – and its protagonist – fixates on one member of the group who demonstrates a familiarity and a respect for Yossi’s taste. He is Tom (Oz Zehavi), whom the other soldiers refer to as “homo,” not as a slur but as a term of endearment. Yossi, on a work-mandated leave, decides to stay at the same Eilat resort.

Here, Segal captures the changing international attitudes regarding sexuality through his two leads. Segal also uses the arts as its own reference tool. Yossi listens Gustav Mahler’s “Adagietto” in the car with the soldiers, and later, poolside, reads Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice(!). Savvy cineastes will pick up on the fact that director Luchino Visconti incorporated “Adagietto” in his film version of Venice. Yossi’s story parallels that of Venice’s own Gustav von Aschenbach, although in this case, it’s Zehavi’s Tom who does the pursuing. Tom is more open and aggressive than Yossi has ever been, and he pursues the schlubby older man both persistently and obviously. There isn’t much conflict here, only Yossi’s internal battle with himself, made apparent both by Fox’s  mise-en-scene  (choosing first to shoot Knoller from above and behind, then later focusing more and more on the man’s face) and Knoller’s own underplaying of Yossi’s painful, yet repressed, yearning to connect. Zehavi, in a gentle performance, is also quite compelling, as are Orly Silbersatz Banai and Shlomo Sadan in supporting roles. (Singers Keren Ann and Devendra Barnhart will also likely draw new fans due to their exposure here.)

The stakes here are both jaw-droppingly low and incredibly crucial. Yossi has little to do other than follow E. M. Forster’s famed edict atop Howards End: “Only connect.” And yet that is a tall order for the naturally inward Yossi. But the film eventually gets so bogged down with Yossi’s own issues that it forgets love and relationships face many other obstacles. It must be said that the movie, rich in so many ways, is nullifyingly simplistic in other ones. Many of the events that befall its protagonist ultimately feel too easy and unearned, and err towards the unconvincing. Yossi may, gratefully, finally choose life. But one still wishes that this sequel had a bit more pulsating within it.

Yossi is playing at the Elinor Bunim Monroe Film Center.