the finish
by
Douglas Messerli
Adam
Kalderon (screenwriter and director) השחיין (The Swimmer) / 2021
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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