Review: In “The Bubble,” Romance Falls Flat Under the Burden of Politics

In the cinema, the love story best and most often told is that of forbidden love, in which forces outside the control of our protagonists thwart the possibility of any kind of happily ever after.  Sometimes these love stories actually attain that joyful finale (My Fair Lady).  More frequently they end in tragedy (Harold and Maude) and very rarely they can manage to fall into bizarrely ambiguous terrain (The Graduate).

Regardless of how it all may end, the forbidden love story remains consistently – and most importantly – a story of circumstance and contextualization.  It is a story of social agents like class, family, politics, and implicit sexual mores coming together against a unique iteration of true love, and that love is subsequently transformed into the other.  It is that very transformation that drives the story forward, and it is what drives our personal investment in the narrative.  To whatever extent, we undoubtedly have all experienced this kind of displacement from “normalcy,” and when the cinema we consume effectively emote these sentiments for us, it is not too difficult to relate to what we see on screen.

The Bubble, a 2007 Israeli film and the second installment in the U of M’s International GLBT Film Series, is a gay love story all about presenting these circumstances.  Director Eytan Fox, who also directed the conceptually similar Yossi and Jagger, contextualizes his film in the kind of civil unrest and political violence that defines – to him – the Israel-Palestinian conflict.  Juggling both romantic and political elements throughout, The Bubble often feels like two different movies, and they do not always converge as neatly as they might have.  Still, the amicably drawn protagonists and supporting characters provide enough charm to make Fox’s effort a sufficiently breezy, if not fully cooked, political/romantic fable.

Set in Tel Aviv, The Bubble tells a story of an Israeli reservist named Noam who begins a passionate affair with Ashraf, a Palestinian from Nablus who is under pressure to court the cousin of his future brother-in-law.  Noam, along with his roommates Lulu and Yali, agree to house Ashraf indefinitely so he might avoid being forced into marriage.  Time passes, and the four friends find themselves increasingly involved in a youth-run anti-war, anti-occupation political movement.  As their political ideals become more defined, Noam and Ashraf’s affection intensifies, but greater issues beyond their control stand in the way of their happiness.

It is the four main characters who alone set the tone for The Bubble.  The chemistry between each individual holds a distinct yet familiar camaraderie about it.  There is a sense of history between these friends, as they feel entirely comfortable in each other’s presence.  I appreciate that these characters never really establish themselves within tired gay stereotype, especially when it could easily have happened.  I enjoyed  the company of these characters, and at no point did I feel like I was stuck in the middle of some queer minstrel show.

That said, the biggest problems I have with The Bubble pertain to the story in which these well-realized characters find themselves.  While it is clearly Fox’s goal to utilize the backdrop of the Israel-Palestinian conflict as a means of presenting a story of conflicted love, Fox does not do enough to establish how interconnected to the larger political scale the romance between Ashraf and Noam truly is.

I am reminded of Fatih Akin’s marvelous 2008 film The Edge of Heaven, which told a similar story of a doomed love between two women caught helplessly in the middle of cultural and political strife.  Whereas Heaven knew to focus on the love story while restraining the politics to an incidental, merely contextual level, The Bubble overwhelmingly brings politics to the forefront, and ultimately fails to work solely at the service of the story’s characters.

While dichotomizing your film between politics and sexuality is not inherently a flaw – Jean-Luc Godard found a successful mix of the two when he made Masculin-Féminin – the simple truth is that Fox, in giving precedent to his political sensibilities, The Bubble does not give necessary attention to the romance between Noam and Ashraf.  The final product, despite its strengths in characterization, feels schizophrenic.

Eytan Fox had all the right ideas; I just wish he knew how to allow them all to congeal into a coherent, multifaceted work.  The Bubble is too much about circumstance; too little about context.

The Bubble was the second film in the University of Minnesota’s International GLBT Film Festival.  Click here to read a summary of the Festival, followed by a brief review of their first film.

It seems a slight change has been issued for today’s film screening.  The Belgian film Ma Vie en Rose will be showing instead, in honor of Transgender Day of Remembrance. The film will be showing at 6:00 PM tonight at Carlson School Room 1-123.

Stay tuned for a review of the Thai film Iron Ladies, which will be showing at 5:00pm on Friday, November 20 on the University of Minnesota Minneapolis Campus.  The location of the screening will be announced soon. Visit http://blog.lib.umn.edu/intlglbt/home/ to discuss on an online forum the films being screened, or email intlglbt@umn.edu with any questions.

International Queer Film Series: Spelling “Foreign” with “GLBT”

Do you remember the first queer movie you ever saw?  For me, it was a little French romance called Come Undone (the title was inexplicably translated from Presque Rien, literally meaning “Almost Nothing,” on its way across the pond).  Apart from some much-desired frontal nudity and a particularly stimulating sex scene on the beach, the movie was pretty lousy; the characters were bland, the storytelling was undisciplined and the experience was overall pretty forgettable.

What I do remember, though, was the experience leading up to my watching Come Undone.  I was a sixteen-year-old, deeply closeted little movie buff, perusing the shelves at the local Blockbuster.  Working my way systematically through the “Foreign Films” rack, I happened to come across this particular title, knowing absolutely nothing about it apart from the fact that its cover sported two slender, dark-haired hunks sporting nothing more than their bare chests.  After about twenty minutes of working up the courage to actually pull the tape from the shelf, I smuggled the movie down to my bedroom, waited until my family was sound asleep, and popped the VHS tape into my TV-VCR combo, the volume audible to nobody else but me (in retrospect, that was probably not necessary, as nobody in my house spoke a word of French).

The point of this story is that the queer-themed movies we watch, regardless of how good or how bad they are (and trust me; many of them are pretty terrible) we seek out these films in hopes of witnessing, finally, some kind of representation of ourselves within popular culture.  And so we consume queer-themed movies not so much for their entertainment value or artistic insight, but for the underlying feeling that, by seeing ourselves represented within a popular medium, we finally are consuming a product made specifically for us.

Like Presque Rien, many of these queer-themed movies come from outside our country’s borders.  In order to celebrate these films and what they mean to us as queer movie-goers, the University of Minnesota’s International GLBTA Student Group, in collaboration with several other campus GLBTA groups, recently began screening a series of films whose central themes – political, cultural, romantic, et cetera – encompass issues faced by GLBTA individuals.  The student-run film festival, which aims both to reflect the diverse cultural values and perspectives of the international community, plans also to screen movies whose specific content coincide with important GLBT events that take place throughout the calendar year, such as Transgender Day of Remembrance and World AIDS Day.

Last Friday, the International LGBT Film Series kicked off with a screening of the 2001 Chinese film Lan Yu, a widely celebrated adaptation of a popular Beijing Internet story (it made its run on the festival circuit upon its release, stopping at Cannes and Sundance).  Lan Yu, a film I am sad to say I have never seen, was an auspicious choice to open this International Festival; it immediately refuted my initial prejudice that all gay-themed movies suck.  The story, which chronicles in its entirety the relationship between a middle-aged, wealthy Beijing businessman and a young university student, certainly sounds familiar from a conceptual standpoint.  I immediately was reminded of 2002’s Food of Love, a 2002 American film built on a vaguely similar premise (naïve student falls for an older man, proceeds to learn some serious truths about life). But where the narrative for Food of Love plods along and is risibly dramatized, Lan Yu unfolds its narrative briskly and with the kind of reserved emotional prowess that only ever seems to come from East Asian cinema.

At 86-minutes, Lan Yu ironically feels a bit too brisk at points; I feel I could have spent some more time with the characters depicted on screen.  While I admire director Stanley Kwan for giving us a romance that does not spoon-feed to its audience the nuances and the circumstances of its subjects, it is equally important not to omit so much characterization that we begin to feel distanced from the relationship being depicted.  Despite these issues, it is worth noting the astonishing amount of craft that clearly went into this small production; there are multiple layers to almost every shot in the film, and there is an honest intensity to each performance.  The art direction is stunning as well; there is a strong sense of urban romanticism in the way Beijing is shot.  The city feels vast, but at the same time, oddly comforting.

This Friday, the GLBTA International Film Festival plans to screen the Israeli film Ha-Buah (The Bubble).  I have not seen this film either and I am anxious to see if it matches the visual texture of Lan Yu or if it devolves into a convoluted, two-hour parade of misery like Presque Rien.  Either way, I am just relieved finally to see a movie like this in a way that no longer involves locking my bedroom door and waiting for all my siblings to fall asleep before me.

Stay tuned for a review of Eytan Fox’s The Bubble, which will be showing at 4:30pm on Friday, November 13 at the Walter Library (Room 402) on the University of Minnesota Minneapolis Campus.  Visit http://blog.lib.umn.edu/intlglbt/home/ to discuss on an online forum the films being screened, or email intlglbt@umn.edu with any questions.

REVIEW: An Offer that Won’t Be Refused

We all know how the mob works. We learned all the rules from the movies. We know that there is a “Don” who runs his own “family,” and they typically resort to some shady, underground activities to accumulate their money and power. Typically, this is done by means of gambling, narcotics, bank robbing, and political puppeteering. Of course, should you make the mistake of taking sides against the family, you might find yourself amongst some unsuspecting fishes with whom to sleep.

Sure, the movies told us all about the mob. So what, might you ask, is all this noise about an alleged “Gay Mob” infiltrating the social consciousness? Producer/Writer Chris Durant, with his film project The Gay Mob, hope to shed light on all the fagolas lurking in the shadows of our streets and frequenting our bars. Last Sunday, Durant offered patrons of Minneapolis’ Bedlam Theater a sneak peek on their work in progress during a public script reading/fundraiser for their project.

The Gay Mob – subtitled “Mafia Wars, Drama Queens and Fairy Godmothers, Oh My!” – tells the story of two gay friends from the Twin Cities who choose to shelter a homeless teen, whose penchant for technological pranksterism leads him to develop a fake website named thegaymob.com. It would seem that not every is quite in on the joke, and – you guessed it – the real Gay Mob intervenes, wreaking chaos on this homeless homo and his unsuspecting guardians.

Yet that’s only one facet of the story Durant’s Durant hopes to tell. Tangentially connected to the script’s narrative include a married man coming to terms with his true sexuality, a maternal drag performer finding closure in a family life teeming with loss and sadness, and a shrill, conservative ideologue hell-bent on passing speedy legislation that would save the sanctity of marriage from certain doom.

Sounds pretty ambitious in scope, doesn’t it? Well, there’s more; The Gay Mob tackles these weighty issues with an unexpectedly cheerful touch, hoping to inject some joy into some serious topics. Durant tells the Column that his intention all along was to handle his material with a sense of urgency, but supported by a tone of consistent lightheartedness. “This project is very personal to me,” says Durant. “I have been working on [The Gay Mob] for a long time…my goal was to portray our lives in a way that was both educational and entertaining.” At the same time, Durant wanted to be careful never to hit his audience over the head with a message.

Indeed, the tone Durant (along with director Anthony Stanton) crafts seldom forays into the didactic. Durant finds great confidence in his cast and crew, many of whom work with him on “The Show So Gay” webisodes. During the script reading, you feel compelled to applaud the ambitions of all parties involved and you feel like you have found a community project worth supporting.

What intrigues me particularly about The Gay Mob film project is that Durant and company plan for their film to root itself stylistically in those old mob movie tropes, introducing to the genre a much-needed queer sensibility. It seems like the logical next step; the very best mob movies stand as definitive representations of Americana. With the queer community inching its way more so into the domain of mainstream America, an iconoclastic “queerification” of the genre feels past due.

I hope it is taken as a compliment if I lament that the script’s storytelling elements fit together a bit too impeccably. I say “compliment,” because I know the material I have seen has the potential for something undoubtedly transcendent. To give an example, each principal character gains personal insight from their travails in the denouement, which the characters quite literally recite to us under the guise of an Outfront “Just Fair” rally. While it is nice to see a community institution like Outfront playing a role in the story, a more elegant handling of the story’s moral would have been to nix this scene entirely. I urge the artists behind this project to afford their audience the ability to interpret the story’s meaning, rather than to bring their own point across via the unnecessary contrivance of narration.

Additionally, some of Durant’s archetypal characters don’t really transcend the generic Peter Lorre and Sean Hayes-style gay screen stereotypes to which we have grown accustomed (and somewhat weary). One particularly effeminate gay character punctuates his dialogue with familiar diva one-liners with such calculated fervor, any intended sense of irony or self-awareness becomes lost in the stereotype, and devolves dangerously close to cringe-worthy territory.

Reservations aside, I take pleasure in visualizing The Gay Mob as a familiar mob movie exercise, structurally broken down in a way that allows for queer genre experimentation à la Haynes or Almodòvar. Given my aforementioned concerns, I am not quite certain that the movie’s creative team will actually move forward with this mindset.

But hey, I can always hope.

For more information on “The Show so Gay” project, or to financially support The Gay Mob, visit their website at http://www.theshowsogay.com/.