Walk on Water **** (2004, Lior Ashkenazi, Knut Berger, Caroline Peters) – Classic Movie Review 13,254

Director Eytan Fox’s 2004 Israeli spy thriller film Walk on Water stars Lior Ashkenazi as a Mossad assassin assigned to find and kill an aged Nazi war criminal. 

The 2004 Israeli spy thriller film Walk on Water [Lalekhet Al HaMayim] is directed by Eytan Fox and stars Lior Ashkenazi, Knut Berger, and Caroline Peters. The screenplay is written by co-producer Gal Uchovsky, who also co-produced his partner Eytan Fox’s 2002 film Yossi & Jagger.

Lior Ashkenazi stars Eyal, a Mossad Israeli security service agent assigned to find and kill an ancient Nazi war criminal. In Israel, Eyal poses as a tour guide and befriends the Nazi’s German upper class adult grandchildren, Axel (Knut Berger) and Pia (Caroline Peters). Eyal is disgusted to discover that Axel is gay after he hooks up with young Palestinian Rafik (Yousef Sweid), though it might be that he is jealous, and he treats the Palestinian with undisguised contempt. Eyal wants to quit but his boss Menachem (Gideon Shemer) insists that he finish the mission, and with Axel returning to Berlin to celebrate his father’s 70th birthday, that means that Eyal will have to travel to Germany for the first time and re-bond with Axel.

It turns out that Eyal speaks German all along, can handle himself in a fight, and has a couple of lethal weapons.

The spy thriller film idea ploughs ahead tensely and urgently, and convincingly too, despite the wave of issues being stirred up and aired in an intelligent screenplay by Gal Uchovsky. The thorny issues are racism, discrimination and young Germans confronting the Nazi past. It has bitten off a lot to chew, and that’s good, managing it carefully even though there are only 103 minutes to do it in.

Walk on Water is well directed, shot (Tobias Hochstein) and edited (Yosef Grunfeld), with an interesting score (Ivri Lider) and music choices (‘Cinderella Rockefella’ is sung by Rita Kleinstein and Ivri Lider).

Lior Ashkenazi and Knut Berger are both very good, inhabiting their different world characters thoughtfully and thoroughly. The film depends on their expert performances, and it gets them, quite subtle and intense. Caroline Peters is appealing in a fairly thankless role, while Gideon Shemer is nice and sinister as the obsessive old Nazi hunter.

Its mysterious title derives of course from Jesus’s walking on water. Initially the two men bond as the Israeli shows the German around the beauty spots, and Eyal takes Axel to the Sea of Galilea, where the German boy treads down a little promontory, and looks like he’s walking on water. Much later, Eyal tells Axel he’s had a happy dream: the two of them were actually walking on water in the Sea of Galilea together. It’s the impossible dream of course.

The dialogue is in English, Hebrew and German. All three languages are subtitled in English in the English version.

Walk on Water premiered on February 5, 2004, at the Berlin International Film Festival. It opened in Israel on March 18, 2004. It debuted in the US on October 24, 2004, at the Milwaukee International Film Festival and was released in the US on March 4, 2005.

Israeli film director Eytan Fox (born on August 21, 1964) is noted for the 2002 film Yossi & Jagger, the 2004 film Walk on Water, the 2006 film The Bubble, the 2012 film Yossi (the sequel to Yossi & Jagger), Cupcakes (Bananot) (2013) and Sublet (2020).

Fox and Gal Uchovsky are long-term his partners and collaborators.

© Derek Winnert 2024 – Classic Movie Review 13,254

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