Adam Kalderon | השחיין (The Swimmer) / 2021

the finish

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adam Kalderon (screenwriter and director) השחיין (The Swimmer) / 2021

 

Erez (Omer Perelman Striks) arrives with his father at an isolated Israeli recreation center, the last of five men who will be trained and compete, under the supervision of the Russian born Dime (Igal Reznik), for the one slot on the Israeli team in the free stroke category of swimming.

     Erez’s father has previously been an Olympic swimmer, and it is clear that he has worked for years to make Erez an Olympic champion. When director Adam Kalderon’s film begins, we have no way of determining what Erez himself thinks of all of this. In a sense, like the other robotized-swimmers, he is focused only on the training regimen and the likelihood of winning. And, indeed, in the first group efforts involving all sorts of experiments in strength, durability, and psychological intimidation Erez seems like a winner.

     Almost from the beginning, in the showers Erez sizes up his competitors—both by their behaviors and by appearance—and perceives that perhaps his only real threat is from Nevo Yassur (Asaf Jonas), a truly beautiful young man who has grown up in London, his father being the Israel Consul General to Great Britain, facts that have awarded him a far greater sense of sophistication and social flexibility than Erez.

     Although Nevo describes having naturally taken to the water at an early age, perhaps we can conjecture it also serving as an alternative to his always busy and missing father—his mother, we later discover, having died when he was young. The blue shimmer of the waves, something Kalderon almost immediately associates with the slim, often nude bodies of the swimmers and their obvious sexual randiness—understandable since these young men have mostly been denied any sexual activity given the demands of focusing on swimming.

      But while the others play the teenage kind of locker room games of pulling away and slapping towels while describing each other as “faggots,” Erez almost immediately sees Nevo in a far different kind of being, not only as his primary competitor but a beauty that in both his body and soul is almost irresistible.

      It is not really clear whether or not Erez has had homosexual feelings for some time or whether there are merely aroused by Nevo. What we recognize is that he has had no time for anything else previously and, likely, never long been out of his parent’s sight.

     To Nevo’s statement of his delight in water, Erez confesses that he hates it, hates the cold, early morning workouts, almost cannot bear the endlessly boring bodily challenges and regimen. And in his statement, we suddenly recognize that he is a young man whose life has been taken away in the attempts to please a demanding father, a sort of fanatic who in his dictatorial manner has robbed his own son’s life from him. Erez will do anything to please his father, but has not fully yet discovered to what kind of behavior he might turn to please himself.

      Deluding himself, perhaps, he imagines that by better getting to know Nevo he can perhaps infiltrate the bodily territory of his competitor in order to discover how to throw him off course. In fact, Erez seems to have fallen so deeply in love with the other boy that he soon doesn’t even know what he is doing, let alone why.

      We’re not sure of whether Nevo shares his sexual feelings or whether he is simply overjoyed to have someone finally paying him attention, but he immediately goes along with the deep friendship wherein the two become nearly inseparable, the pair discovering unguarded corners of the surrounding desert territory in their free moments and, later, one night, in their illegal sharing of a bedroom. But it becomes noticeable to all the others, and particularly to Dime, who warns Erez quite straight-forwardly that his focus must be entirely upon himself and act of swimming. No outside friendships are possible, particularly close relationships. But Dine goes ever further, suggesting that if he observes him “flirting” he will immediately be cut from the training team.

      The two young men, at least at first, do not seem engaged in physical contact. But we quickly begin to realize that psychologically and, speaking in the metaphor of their sport, almost physically they have crossed-over into each other’s lane. Something deeply sexually lurks in the background of their relationship, obvious enough that the others notice it and finally, resenting Erez’s attention to Nevo and control over him, forces them to first tease and finally shun him. If nothing else, we

recognize just how serious the relationship already is when we watch Erez, having stolen Nemo’s swimming suit, masturbating while he holds it up to his face in late night bed.

      Although Dime can find no specific evidence of homosexual activity (presumably what he means by “flirtation”) he senses it, like the others, in the air. And whereas, at first, he clearly promoted Erez as his favorite, backed up by the boy’s father’s friendly visits to the center, he slowly pulls his love and attention away from Erez, torturing and punishing him while clearly now favoring Nevo.

      As critic Elizabeth Weitzman writes summarizes Dime’s behavior in her review in The Wrap:

     

“As Erez and Nevo get closer, Dima’s [set] strict rules seem designed to control not only the athletes, but also the men they’re becoming outside of the pool. Though he has no problem with Nevo fancying female swimmer Maya (May Kurtz), he ruthlessly threatens to cut Erez from the team if he so much as flirts with another guy.”

 

      Clearly to Erez, however, Dime is simply a more brutal version of his own father, and instead of bowing to his strictures, he gradually goes out of control, spying on Nevo and Maya and reporting her as having vomited in his room which, as a sign of illness, gets her removed from the compound.

     Erez begins occasionally showing up a few minutes late to the precisely timed hours of early morning exercises. And he becomes close to the seemingly only human being on Dime’s staff, the elderly but still elegant Paloma (Nadia Kucher). Although, since she was Maya’s trainer, she might have reason to dislike Erez, she clearly sympathizes with his dilemmas, revealing to him at one of their illegal meet-ups that long ago she was Israel’s youngest Olympian, a gymnast. When the still naïve Erez wonders, having been so famous, why isn’t she living in a mansion somewhere and enjoying her life. Her answer is a truth that he, alas, has just now begun to recognize: “Competitive sports are a tragedy for the body. And the soul.”

     In one scene with her, Erez even toys with crossdressing, putting on her childhood gymnast uniform, the two of them laughing as he attempts to imitate the gestural and graceful dismounts of a female gymnast at the very moment that Dime knocks on her door to complain that he is fearful that all his boys are slipping out of his control, suggesting that he might have been better off remaining in Siberia than to attempt to train Israelis.

     Finally, Erez convinces Nevo to spend the night in his room, as they share a hidden marijuana joint. More important, since at this late hour they are no longer allowed into the halls, they each piss in to drinking container until it is full. Jokingly, Nevo suggests he should take a sip, Erez asking what will he give him. When Nevo, after a pause, makes the offer if he drinks it, and of whatever he wants, it appears that Erez might willing drink it. Later, hey both masturbate together, but in separate beds, and finally turning away, while still making their desires of joining one another quite apparent.

      They both arrive late to the next morning’s session, for which Dime punishes the entire team, forcing them, fully clothed to jump into the water, and to pull themselves out and do various calisthenics again and again.

   For the pre-competition run, Erez shows up having peroxided his red hair, Dime threatening to cut him even from the competition and demanding he shave it all off.

      As is customary, for the final swimming competition, the swimmers are forced to take a blade to remove every last hair on their legs, asses, and, presumably, even their pubic region. Nevo has never gone through the process, and some time earlier Erez has offered to shave him, if he desires.

      Still smarting from his friend’s behavior, Nemo attempts it by himself, but when he finds it nearly impossible to rub on the soapy lotion and pull the razor across his body parts, he asks Erez if he is still willing to undertake the act.

     Their session ends with the crotch, with Erez clearly finally willing to make the final leap in an empty pool—the opposite direction from which he has been directed by his father and his martinet of a trainer—by reaching toward Nevo’s cock. The tension is palpable as we have no way of knowing whether Nevo will permit it nor not; he seems, in fact, to desire it was well. Yet he pulls away, finally calling Erez what everyone else has, and denying any homosexual desires.

   Erez angrily forces Nevo to leave his room, sitting at the foot of the door in despair, refusing to answer what appear to be Nevo’s gentle knocks to allow him back in. We have no idea whether Nevo wishes to explain his behavior, to justify it, or perhaps has second thoughts about granting his friend his desires. Erez does not grant him any of those outs.

      For his final walk down the hall the day of the competition, a hall that for Perez has almost become a kind of passageway into some psychological horror tale, Erez wears pink sweatpants, further creating enmity among the other swimmers who have already ousted him from their shared showers.

      Quite brilliantly, the director himself, moreover, takes the film where it now wants to go— completely over the top. For the final swimming match each man stands at his mark waiting for the whistle to be followed by their leaps into the pool.

 

      But for the rest of the competition Kalderon has drained the pool, as the swimmers begin a spectacular gay dance number, weaving in and out of lanes as an announcer calls their positions as if it were a horse race. The dancers gather together in circles, wave in and out of line dances, and generally turn the swim meet into a grand Broadway-like musical number.

      According to the announcer, Erez clearly leads as the group approaches the final wall, with Nevo close behind. But amazingly at the very last moment, Erez slows down and Nevo touches his hand to the wall seconds before Erez.

       We imagine what we believe to be the truth, that Erez has given up the match to Nevo and, in the process, feeing himself to discover his own desires instead of allowing others to force him for the rest of his life to be an Olympian competitor. Perhaps there is still time for this young man to uncover who he is, to realize his sexuality, and to explore life.

      Presumably Nevo has now found away to get his father’s attention, at least for a few moments.

      Critics and commentators were particularly negative about the amount of sexual nudity homosexual content, some of them refusing to even identify Erez as a gay man. I realize I may now be almost inured to male nudity and gay sexual subject matter having seen the thousands LGBTQ films I have already watched; but frankly it seemed rather tame to me. How else, moreover, can one convey what is happening in Erez’s previously unsexualized head? Certainly, other Israeli directors such as Amos Guttman and Eythan Fox have been far more transgressive.

      I suspect the fact that Kalderon has taken his gay tale into the previously sacrosanct halls of sports was the reason for some of the consternation. But one might have thought that after Carri Richardson, Campbell Harrison, Nikki Hiltz, and of course Greg Louganis and Tom Daly, along with 823 other Olympians since 1896 who identified as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, pansexual, non-binary, and/or queer, 46 of them in swimming, that this would no longer really be an issue.*

 

*Source: “List of LGBT Olympians and Paralympians,” Wikepedia.

 

Los Angeles, September 20, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (September 2024).