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.

Joseph Silberg (Jules Sitruk), has grown up in an Israeli household under Orith and Alon (Emmanuelle Devos and Pascal Elbé). After enlisting in the Israeli Air Force, a blood test reveals that his blood type matches neither parent. Some medical sleuthing reveals the error (since DNA determines military eligibility). Meanwhile, Yacine Al Bezaaz (Medhi Dehbi), Israeli by birth, has been raised on the West Bank by Leila and Said (Areen Omari and Khalifa Natour). His family is far from wealthy, but he had the good fortune to be educated in Paris.

Both families learn of the swap (the infants, born during the first Gulf War, were placed in the same incubator during a SCUD attack) at the same time, but have mixed reactions on how to tell their sons the news. Both mothers react personally and emotionally, while the fathers bury their sorrow and fear under anger at how their sons have been brought up on the other side.

Joseph and Yacine, however, do not identify themselves by national identity but by their interests. Joseph loves music and longs to be a singer-songwriter; Yacine went to school in France and aims to study medicine and return to Paris. The French connection here is important: Orith was born there and most of the characters speak French, Lévy’s native tongue, providing an additional multicultural bond for many of these inadvertently entwined lives.

Son, adapted by Lévy with Noam Fitoussi and Nathalie Saugeon from on an idea by Fitoussi, asks more questions about who Joseph and Yacine are than what they fundamentally are. Joseph asks his rabbi, “Am I still Jewish?” The rabbi explains that while Joseph was one of his best students, his birth mother was not Jewish, so per Jewish law, he is not a Jew, but can convert. Sadder are the consequences on the home front, including Bilal’s (Mahmood Shalabi) rejection of his younger brother Yacine. But the greater ramifications don’t have time to sink in throughout the film, and are merely hinted at. Lévy’s film skirts truly dangerous outcomes for more melodramatic (and predictable)ones, a choice that limits Son to convention but also makes it feel emotionally familiar to all audiences.

While several of the characters create pivotal dramatic moments, most of them feel cut from the same reasonably sympathetic cloth. Devos and Omari come off the most naturally of Lévy’s performers, since their reactions to the news of the switch feel the most human. Elbé and Natour, conversely, feel a bit more regimented by their characters’ responses, which seem dictated by a story requiring as many emotional boundaries as it does political and geographical ones. Dehbi and Sitruk each struggle a bit more when it comes to realizing their men-children. Still, Son remains a taut reminder for all of those watching to treasure what they have.

The below fundraising pitch was sent out Friday afternoon by former New York City Councilman Steve Orlow, a former “member at large” who now practices law in Flushing, and Eli Hertz, a pro-Israel author. In the pitch, the Lancman supporters profess that they were “shocked” at Crowley’s statement, and that the “flippant attitude towards Israel’s safety and security shows that certain candidates in Queens are simply not fit for the responsibilities of national office.”

Oh, and that people upset about Crowley’s comment should give money to Lancman.

In the Times article, Crowley says she would rather focus on issues like health care and care for the elderly. And in an email to City & State over the weekend, one of Crowley’s top campaign advisers wrote in defending the candidate’s comment:

Elizabeth Crowley believes that Israel is America’s most important ally in the Middle East — our strategic partner against global terrorism — and values that relationship and honors New York’s special bond with the people of Israel,” the Crowley adviser wrote.

However, there is distance between the candidates (Rory and Grace, on one hand, and Elizabeth on the other) in terms of *emphasis*.

* Israel is not the most important issue we face,

* it’s not the most important issue for most voters in this election, and

* Elizabeth’s campaign does not intend to be governed by what some people might view as the David Weprin/Bob Turner playbook.

When Elizabeth calls this is a distraction, that’s what she meant: candidates focusing on Israel to the detriment of other issues is a distracting for the electorate and, frankly, if folks are thinking of this race as “Israelapalooza,” as one person said in the Times, that’s a bit demeaning to the process and to voters. If Rory’s campaign or Grace’s campaign want to be recognized as “the Israel candidates” or “the Israel candidates,” — for fundraising purposes or otherwise — we’re not going to fight them for the privilege of running a single-issue campaign.

Assemblywoman Grace Meng and Republican Councilman Dan Halloran are also running, and like Lancman, both are paying their fair share of respect to Israel issues.

To read the article at City & State and see Lancman’s initial fundraising pitch, click here.

Kehinde Wiley, “Leviathan Zodiac (The World Stage: Israel),” 2011, oil and gold enamel on canvas. Private Collection. Courtesy Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, California.. Photo by Robert Wedemeyer.

Kehinde Wiley’s Cross-Cultural Pageant

Kehinde Wiley uses deliberately flamboyant colors. Loud as hip-hop music and just as assertive are the grand claims Wiley makes for the subjects he paints: Young men of, yes, color stand out among the traditional, time-muted tints of the ancient and holy fabrics that frame them in the exhibition The World Stage: Israel at The Jewish Museum.

Wiley picked his models, Ethiopian- and native-born Jews as well as Arabs, from dance clubs, arcades and street fairs in Israel. He looked for attitude that shows “how one puts oneself gracefully in the world.” This is not hipster exoticism; their postures recall the imperiousness of Old World doges and potentates. Outside the museum realm, these poses would be called “swagger.” The exhibition’s name reflects Wiley’s awareness that the eyes of world watch the underclass, whose members project exploitable, energized music and original personal style. He places their class struggle in flamboyant settings—in this case Torah ark curtains, wall hangings and bedcovers—that integrate alienated cultures. T-shirted torsos are wrapped in ornamental patterns—vines, serifs, animal figures—that grasp and cling like psychedelic tendrils. For Wiley, these young men act as iconic ambassadors of desire.

Politicizing the ripeness of youth, Wiley demonstrates how hip-hop music and fashion, linked to foundational cultures that continually struggle for worldwide respect, have captivated the global imagination. Previous shows in Wiley’s World Stage series featured brash young men from China, Africa, Brazil and India/Sri Lanka. It’s an eye-catching brotherhood similar to the effrontery of Benneton and Desigual billboards— and these portraits are ads, too. They are products that endow the working class with the bright vibrancy of fancily dressed comic-book heroes. They are meant to pop.

The Los Angeles-born Wiley was an impressionable 11-year-old when the L.A. rap group N.W.A. released Straight Outta Compton, the album with the notorious single “Fuck tha Police.” It must have been strangely exciting to grow up on the outskirts of apartheid Hollywood, to see young black kids challenge police authority and rival a legendary cultural institution with gangsta rap, its own impudent music culture soon to claim the world.

To read the full article at City & State click here.