E-Mail This Article to a Friend The spy who loved me Eytan Fox gets his feet wet in Walk on Water BY PETER KEOUGH
	Walk on Water Directed by Eytan Fox. Written by Gal Uchovsky. With Lior Ashkenazi, Knut Berger, Caroline Peters, Gideon Shemer, Hanns Zischler, and Carola Regnier. A Samuel Goldwyn release (104 minutes). In Hebrew, German, and English with English subtitles. At the Kendall Square.
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Israeli director Eytan Fox has a way of reversing expectations. In his first film, Yossi & Jagger, he introduces his heroes — a tough commander of an Israeli unit and his dashing lieutenant posted on the tense, frozen frontier with Lebanon — and then, minutes into the film, has them making love in the snow. Not the traditional image of the vaunted IDF.

In Walk on Water, Fox undermines stereotypes with less flamboyance and with more ambiguity, perhaps, or less conviction. The dichotomies he deals with go beyond gay and straight, male and female. They include duty and freedom, revenge and reconciliation, love and loathing. The result is less focused and finished (not to mention half an hour longer) than his first effort. It is less confrontational, if less satisfying.

Again, the protagonist is a model of Israeli machismo. Eyal (Lior Ashkenazi) is an assassin for Mossad. You kind of suspect his lethal intent when he smiles at a little boy with his parents on a barge cruising the Bosporus, but it’s still a surprise when he sticks a needle into his target. The little boy sheds a tear. Eyal sees it, and he will see it again in too-calculated flashbacks. When he returns to Israel, his colleagues pop champagne to celebrate his termination of yet another notorious terrorist. Back at his apartment, though, his wife is dead. The victim not of terrorism but of her own despair.

Such are the rewards of duty, of seeing the world in terms of good and evil and acting accordingly. The lesson is pat, and neither the viewer nor Eyal buys it. He remains dry-eyed, and not just because of a tear-duct defect that renders him incapable of tears (one of a couple of instances where Fox’s symbols clang too loudly). Although his grizzled boss, Menachem (Gideon Shemer), thinks he needs a break, Eyal is eager for another job. Menachem puts him on a pet project — tracking down the notorious Nazi war criminal Alfred Himmelman, who’s suspected of escaping to Argentina and being maintained there by his wealthy son, who’s still living in Germany.

But Eyal’s assignment hardly involves the derring-do of The Marathon Man. Instead, he must shepherd the target’s grandson, Axel (Knut Berger), who is arriving in Israel to visit his sister Pia (Caroline Peters), who has renounced the family’s Nazi past and is living on a kibbutz. Perhaps Eyal can get some information from them. Eyal is furious: he’s being put out to pasture.

Maybe with good reason. At this point, Eyal seems like the world’s most obtuse secret agent. Axel likes show tunes, he picks up local folk dances to teach his special-needs students back in Germany. (Eyal, a tough guy, doesn’t dance.) When asked about the prevalence of circumcision in Europe versus the Middle East, he has unusually detailed knowledge. Still, Eyal thinks his charge is just some do-gooding European knee-jerk liberal who has the audacity to look at the suicide bombers’ side of the story.

By the time it’s obvious even to Eyal that Axel is gay, he already likes the guy. He’s been seduced not by his physical beauty but by his spiritual innocence. Fox makes this somewhat lugubrious point through the power of simple images. In his tour of Israel, Axel asks to be taken to the usual sites. A striking scene finds the two men lying on the stark white sands of the Dead Sea, their bodies coated in black mud. The black-and-white universe of Eyal melts away when the two together bathe in the water. Later, at the Sea of Galilee, Axel refers to the Gospel story of Jesus testing Peter’s faith that gives the film its title. If we are pure, Axel insists, we can indeed walk on water.

Eyal is far from pure, though, and he certainly doesn’t think someone who screws Arab boys could be pure either. With relief and revulsion, he ends his assignment. But as it turns out, Axel did have information about his grandfather, and Eyal must pursue the case in Berlin under less pastoral and more generically suspenseful conditions. What follows is like Notorious if the Ingrid Bergman character had been played by Claude Rains. Or could have been had Fox mustered some of the trangressiveness he showed when he had Yossi and Jagger wander out into the snow. Instead, he leaves questions of male bonding and macho violence hanging. When Eyal beats the crap out of skinhead gay bashers on the metro, Axel shocks him by saying that all such brutes should be exterminated. When Eyal melts like a schoolgirl on the verge of carrying out his final orders, he shocks himself by weeping in the arms of the newly ruthless Axel.

Which, of course, brings us back to Pia, who’s pining on the kibbutz because Israeli men show no emotion. (And when they do, it’s usually resentment over her family’s Nazi past.) Will Axel’s gay eye set this Israeli guy straight? Although far from miraculous, Walk on Water is a step in the right direction.