Shimon Kabili | The Way Out / 2017

perhaps the truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Shimon Kabili (screenwriter and director) The Way Out / 2017 [25 minutes]

 

This US film, based on true events, tells a story about a Mexican vacation, filmed in Israel with a mostly Israeli cast.

       Ryan Moor (Aki Avni) is a well-to-do real estate developer who is vacationing with his family, his wife Natalie (Sharon Ben Tovim), his daughter, and son in a Mexican resort. Evidently he is involved in deals in this community as well, since all the hotel employees seem to know him and he’s given a grand suite with a stunning view of the ocean, the hostess immediately providing his children with special tickets to a beach ride.

      He and his family appear to be nearly perfect, except for a very important matter that he has evidently long been hiding. Ryan is deeply in love with an Argentinian national, a male name Ariel (Nir Zelichowski) who is living illegally in Mexico. And in that regard, we immediately recognize this film as sharing issues that were raised, without the wife’s point of view, in Todd Haynes’ 2002 feature film Far from Heaven.

      This beautifully filmed movie, with cinematography by Shark De Mayo and an excellent musical score by Ophir Leibovitch, begins with Ryan’s arrest by Mexican police on the beach where he has retreated, after sex, to talk with Ariel. Even there, however, he can hardly keep his hands off his lover and the police find them as they are about to again engage in sex, illegal, so we are later told, on the beach in this resort community.

     Resisting arrest, Ryan is beaten and taken in for interrogation, he constantly insisting that he wasn’t doing anything, until finally meeting up with the police head, Juan (Makram Khoury) who tells him that the fine his criminal act is $1,000. A call to Ariel results eventually in the payment after long hours on a bed without mattress or pillow and a nearby hole in the floor for a latrine in a padlocked cage.

     Moving in and out of time, the film shows him with his wife revealing that their sexual relationship has changed, he rejecting her sexual advances. And yet we glimpse his moments of love and happiness with is children.

     But the most moving scene is the one in which, in the middle of the night and after sneaking out of his bed where Natalie lays sleeping, Ryan and Ariel meet up on a derelict side street. It is clear that his love for Ariel is far deeper than any love making he might be able to revive in his heterosexual relationship.

      How long his homosexual activity has been going on or whether or not it has involved only Ariel is never revealed. But for any of us who have observed closeted heterosexuals in their attempts to find sexual fulfillment it is a sadly familiar story, as the head-over-heels in love Ryan must block out most of his life and his moral commitment to it for a few moments of pleasure.

       This story might have ended in a kind of cyclic pattern—after being freed with the payment, the husband returning to pretend his joyful embracement of the family—were it not that writer / director Shimon Kabili takes it in an odd direction.

       When the payment is made the police chief seems to be driving Ryan back to is hotel—although we are not certain and are somewhat fearful when Ryan asks, “Where are we going?”—all the while the older man, Juan, asking him questions about his marriage and family, which Ryan readily answers. But when he asks about his “boyfriend,” Ryan once more bulks, refusing to admit to such a relationship: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Juan pulls the car over to the shoulder and stops the engine, as we become truly fearful of the situation.

      The police chief begins by describing his Playa community as being religious and traditional with regard to marriage and family. He too had a son Miguel, he tells his prisoner, who people saw go into “a dice club,” where tourists go. He admits that he couldn’t accept it, being a great sin in his family and in response, he expelled his son from his home and refused to talk with him after, despite his wife’s constant attempts to convince him to change his mind along with his son’s attempts to resume their relationship. “I didn’t want to hear.”

      He takes out a photo of his son from his billfold and shows it to Ryan. After a long pause, he continues: “He killed himself. …I wanted him to live my way. Now he doesn’t live at all. Not my way or any way.”

       This is a very touching scene which we recognize as the only moral message possible in this film. But we have some confusion, obviously, about where his confession is going? Obviously he is heartbroken over his rejection of his son, his inability to accept him for who he was. But what is he suggesting for the man trapped in his car? Like Ryan, we want to ask, “Where are we going?”

        As Juan removes the prisoner’s handcuffs, before driving him on, he finishes up with a piece of advice: “I hope you understand what you are doing.”

        And now we can begin comprehend his meaning. Ryan himself, in this case, is both Juan and his son, a man torn in two, the one refusing to permit the other to live his life as he must. Death is imminent unless he makes a choice to find “the way out” of the bind in has put himself in.

       This excellent work doesn’t provide us with the answer to what this troubled man decides. All we see is his return to the early twilight hotel rooms, watching briefly wander the rooms in his torn shirt and his bloodied lip, after an absence surely noticed by his wife. He checks in on his children, closing the door tight before moving on into his bedroom, sitting down upon the bed and shaking his wife awake with an assured voice speaking her name “Natalie.”

       Let me just suggest, it does not sound like he is about to cry out in a complex lie of how what has happened to him is the cause of a terrible mistake, but rather that he has something to share with her. Just perhaps the truth.

Los Angeles, August 31, 2022 | Reprinted from My Queer Cinema Blog (August 2022).