WALK ON WATER
Directed by: Eytan Fox.
Produced by: Amir Harel, Gal Uchovsky.
Written by: Gal Uchovsky.
Director of Photography: Tobias Hochstein.
Edited by: Yosef Grunfeld.
Music by: Ivri Lider.
Released by: Samuel Goldwyn/Roadside Attractions.
Language: English, Hebrew & German with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: Israel. 104 min. Not Rated.
With: Lior Ashkenazi, Knut Berger, Carolina Peters & Gidon Shemer.

Only a month since his wife's suicide, Mossad master assassin Eyal (Lior Ashkenazi) insists on taking on a new mission: finding the whereabouts of an aging Nazi, who has hid for decades in Argentina but has suddenly disappeared. The Israeli intelligent service suspects he may be trying to contact his family in Germany. The man's atoning granddaughter lives in an Israeli Kibbutz where her lanky brother Axel (Knut Berger) is due for a visit. Posing as Axel's tour guide, Eyal becomes his confidant and wiretaps his sister's apartment, gleaming information from "Hansel and Gretel," as Eyal derisively calls them. Axel - a Berlin teacher of immigrant children who also expresses sympathy for the Palestinian cause - is a loopy peacenik in Eyal's eyes. But the men do have something in common, ghosts in their closets: for Eyal, his murderous past; Axel, his family's involvement in the Holocaust.

With a cleft chin and pale blue eyes, even-keel and leather-clad Lior Ashkenazi is like an Israeli Tom Cruise (he's even about the same height and build). Eyal's sardonic disdain saves this pessimist from becoming a one-note character. Changing the radio station he complains, "They always play sad music after a bombing." Never far away from this story is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The film's most tense moment occurs when Eyal browbeats an Arab into refunding money to Axel, accusing the merchant of fleecing the tourist. Eyal is so sure of himself that he doesn't pick up clues about Axel's sexuality that the audience will have readily discern.

Whether it veers toward cloak-and-dagger espionage, gay agitprop, or even comedy (a night at a Kibbutz karaoke or Eyal's bewilderment at a gay bar), this drama never flags, although much of what develops is hardly surprising. The plentiful hot-button issues never steal the focus from the beguiling Alex and Eyal. Technically more polished with a more fluid narrative than director Eytan Fox's previous Yossi & Jagger, Walk on Water's use of locations like Istanbul, the Dead Sea, and Berlin offers an eyeful for the armchair traveler. Kent Turner
March 4, 2005