Moti Rachamim | Iftah / 2020

compromise

by Douglas Messerli

 

Moti Rachamim (screenwriter and director) Iftah / 2020 [41 minutes]

 

Iftah is yet another of the dozens of films in which a young gay man (Zohar Sabag) becomes involved in a marriage, denying his sexual proclivities—in this case we see the young man as a teenager even involved with a much younger boy (Dror Margalit)—who suddenly in the middle of a marriage, along with a beloved son, Or (Lahav Mizarchi), desperately feels the need to escape to the city, Tel-Aviv, with its possibilities of a homosexual community.

    But Iftah, a dreamer architect, creating large high rises in a society which wants simply someone to chart out the rooms of consumer home units, is not only filled with guilt, but cannot support himself in his new world. His rent is overdue. He has few new friends in the world in which he has chosen to embrace, and he is frustrated by former memories of love and desire, which director Moti Rachamim’s memory-drama plays out again and again, sometimes in an almost melodramatic manner.

     At one point, in a kind of peace offering between himself and his past, he revisits his former wife Iris (Tal Eden), bringing along a computer game for his son, and suggesting that just until he finds his way in the new world into which he has escaped, that he might return, sleep in another room, and find a way to help her raise or disconsolate son, who clearly loved his father dearly.

     Although Iris still deeply loves him, her hurt dominates, and she sends him packing, he taking the gift along with him. There seems to be no resolve. And many a viewer, I am sure, would support her righteousness. He has, after all, betrayed her, lied to her about his own sexual activities even before the marriage, and pretended to be in a father role which he could not maintain. This is what happens to men who cannot accept their own sexual feelings, time and again. And this is what becomes of their families.

     Yet Israeli director Rachamin attempts to show us the problem from all sides, and portrays the dismal reality of the betrayer, the beloved husband and father attempting to remake a life that even he doesn’t quite comprehend. Iftah is not the bar-going type, he is not a gay man on the prowl, but a deeply conflicted young man trying to make his way both in a frighteningly new sexual world and in a society which is not ready to accept his dreams of architectural creation. Both of the most important forms of imagination that anyone possesses are unacceptable in this society, and even the bravery of his decision to make the best of it doesn’t necessarily resolve the problem. He is still an outsider not only sexually but professionally.

     Yet Iftah, if nothing else, is an endless dreamer, and we see him in the last frames of this excellent short film walking along the street with the gift he had planned to give his son Or, perhaps on his way once again to his former wife Iris, who might now, given her own deep love of him, allow him back into her and her son’s life as a friend instead of lover. We can’t know whether or not that might happen, but after her rejection of another suitor, who may himself had sex with Iftah, who has spoken badly of her ex-husband, we suspect she might be ready to embrace him in another role outside of convention.

      This truly moving and well-directed short film deserves at least two or three viewings, as I have given it. The characters, on second and third viewings, come more fully into dimension, the interruptive scenes from the past pushing further into the action of the film itself. The inevitability of the film seems far more obvious, and the sad results of Iftah’s necessary break with Iris is seen less as a betrayal but a final recognition of the man’s difference related intensely with his dreams as an architect which the society will never be able to accept. The Moon, the name of his highrise project, alas can never be lassoed and brought to earth. Iftah, alas, remains in the clouds where so many closeted gay men have lost their lives. One might even suggest that all of Tennessee Williams’ gay figures shared the same fate. Compromise is the only solution, and it is a true killer.

 

Los Angeles, March 12, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2025).