The Bubble

Until the film's third act when the plot grows ultra-melodramatic, this gay-tinged Romeo and Juliet story is a charmer about loves and lifestyles that resist acquiescence to the laws of the land and the popular wisdom of their given cultures. The conflicts are as old as Western religion and as new as suicide bombers. Set in the lands of Zion and Palestine, The Bubble's action takes place in the modern cities of Tel Aviv and Nablus. At times, the film has an almost ethnographic feel as it paints a picture of what it's like to be young, hip, and liberal in the midst of the dichotomous world of Tel Aviv, a city whose roots are both very traditional and cutting-edge modern. The story's two guys and a girl – Noam (Knoller), Yelli (Freidmann), and Lulu (Wircer) – are three twentysomethings who share an apartment in Tel Aviv's trendy neighborhood where they are said to be living in an escapist bubble. Noam works in a record store while also serving intermittent military duty at a crossing point between Israel and the West Bank. His best friend, Yelli, manages a hip cafe, and both men are active participants in Tel Aviv's gay culture, and hetero Lulu bides her time working in a boutique while hoping eventually to go to Paris one day to study art and fashion. Meanwhile, they live, love, and plan their next happening: the so-called Rave Against the Occupation. The film's dramatic opening sequence, which shows Noam on guard duty checking travelers for bombs, seems to exist primarily so that he can exchange furtive glances with Ashraf (Sweid), a gay Palestinian who later comes to Tel Aviv to pay Noam a visit. The two men promptly fall in love despite their differences; their sex scenes are explicit (as are Lulu's) but Ashraf's Arabic background forces his sexuality into a tightly locked closet – although there's nothing like a rave on the beach to loosen things up. Life in the "bubble" is contrasted with the degradations that are specific to life in Nablus, the West Bank city that is home to Palestinian refugees and Hamas. Israeli director Fox has built his career on films that march into the tangle of gay sex and politics (Walk on Water, Yossi & Jagger), and The Bubble is his most accomplished film so far. The Bubble enjoys a distinctive specificity while also courting the emotions of repressed and restless youth everywhere.