sublet: making room
by Douglas Messerli
Eytan Fox and Itay Segal (screenplay), Eytan
Fox (director) Sublet / 2020
The central characters of Eytan Fox’s Sublet
are Michael (John Benjamin Hickey), a late middle aged journalist happily married
to his gay lover back in the US, and a young film director Tomer (Niv Nissim)
encompassing many of the values of the younger Israeli generation, dissatisfied
by the secular and patriarchal past they are still, at times, called upon to
embrace. On face value both seem quite acclimated to their cultural and sexual
roles despite whatever failures they might recognize in their own societies.
But that very perception is created entirely by their own delusions and
the self-denial of who each of them truly is. Michael, writer of The New
York Times column titled “The Intrepid Traveler” just arrived in Israel to
the food, architecture, people, and cultural values in just five days, is
anything but an easy traveler and inwardly is just the opposite of being
intrepid. He is rather an almost fanatical man of order who relies on the
predictability of his self-constructed reality to assure him that all is well.
Yet even from the beginning of this voyage, arriving at the apartment he has
sublet for his stay, he is met with everything he fears: unpredictability,
chance, disorder, and a young landlord Tomer who stands against almost all the
values Michael clings to.
Having to rent out his space simply to bring in enough money to pay for
some of his new film shoot, Toomer attempts to convince Michael—determined to
hail another taxi and check into a local hotel—that the apartment is much
better than it looks and stands in the center of a district of Tel Aviv that
has been voted the best new hot spot in the world by Time Out. No one
with half a brain would believe him, but Michael is suffering jet-lag and, we
might suspect, finds his landlord to be a quite dashing gay man. And so Toomer
dashes off, leaving Michael, with an almost anal sense of order, to
rehabilitate his temporary habitation.
When asked during a telephone call by his New York husband to show him
around the place, the journalist waves the cell-phone camera vaguely in a few
directions while mouthing the words that might once have suggested their
purpose—kitchen, bedroom, living room, etc. Even his companion, however, cannot
help but notice the handsome young man’s photograph on the kitchen door, upon
whose looks he comments, perhaps somewhat enviously or even sensing that
something if up with Michael’s apparent discontent.
Michael
has already bought pastries from a nearby shop voted the best for such fare in
the city, and invites Toomer to stay for breakfast. Although Toomer can’t stand
breakfast as a meal—the first of dozens of oppositions he will lay out over the
course of the film—he nonetheless hangs about, taking his roomer to a local
restaurant and through the robbery of his bicycle describing to him some of the
problems in a culture which, if he called the police, would probably close down
the immigrant bike shop to where the robber delivered his stolen vehicle. In
their brief early conversation, he laughs at Michael’s list of “have-to-visit”
locations, suggesting they’re all fine if you’re an American touring your
daughter who has recently been bat-mitzvahed.
The
far less impulsive Michael does leap, however, when he discovers that his
landlord still has no place to stay for the night, in inviting him to stay in
his own apartment to sleep on the couch. In return, Michael suggests Toomer
take him on his own tour of Tel Aviv, allowing him a chance to truly be
somewhat “intrepid,” to see a world of Israel otherwise unavailable to him.
The
two thus become a sort of temporary “odd-couple,” who quickly reveal their
oppositional natures: if Michael is married, Toomer does not believe in
monogamy—or for that matter anything that might clearly define his gay
sexuality. While Toomer makes cheap and shocking science-fiction films, Michael
prefers music, dance, and films undefined by specific genres. Toomer, checking
his new friend out on the internet discovers he has long ago written a book
about a relationship during the early AIDS crisis. “Why does everything have to
begin with AIDS?” he cries out. Michael points out that not only did he live
through time but lost his then-lover to the disease. When a dancer friend
describes her relief that she and her dancing companion about to immigrate to
Berlin, Michael suggests that given what Germany stood for, it seems ironic
that she would take that position; both she and Toomer laugh, explaining that
Berlin is the current hot-bed for all new cultural developments. Toomer invites
a hot boy he sees in Grindr over for a threesome with whom he has delicious sex
while Michael watches (dressed in pajamas that Toomer has mocked) in discomfort
before hurrying off to bed. In short, these two gay men, at opposite ends of
their lives, slowly begin to educate each other about the worlds they inhabit.
We
also begin to realize, however, that what they truly believe is not always what
they each insist they do. Although Toomer claims he does not want a
relationship which delimits what he can do, he encourages his dancer girlfriend
to remain with her partner, and dismisses the continued frustrations they have
with one another, which when Michael and Toomer attend one of their
performances seems to be played out in their dance itself. Although he claims no
sorrow over his father’s death, it is clear that the relationship he has
developed with Michael is a sort of father-son connection. He begins covertly
reading Michael’s book which he somehow discovers in a used book shop.
When Toomer disparages social activism, Michael argues that you can and
often need to remake the world in which you were born, reminding his younger
friend that he and others redefined the political and sexual values of their
time in the late 1960s through the 1970s.
For
all of his commitment to family and marriage, we discover through his phone
conversations with his husband, that he is hurt to discover that his partner
has attempted to make a connection with a possible surrogate mother to produce
their own child. In another call he tells his companion that he does not want
to continue the search and is against the idea of their attempting to raise a
child at their ages. Yet, when visiting the beach with Toomer he spots a child
wandering into the ocean, he rushes forward to save him from being drowned. His
own relationship with his father seems to have fraught with tensions, some of
which he recalls from only other visit to Israel.
And, finally, in a beautiful evening dinner to which Toomer has invited
Michael to share with the younger man’s mother, when the topic of death arises,
he calls up the fact that he and his husband had previously hired a surrogate
birth mother, only to have the child die soon after being born, forcing him to
break down in tears at the otherwise happy occasion. Both Toomer and his mother
try to convince him that he would be a perfect father, which assures, if nothing
else, that when he returns to the US, he will have to reevaluate his decision.
Michael comes eventually to perceive Israel and his new-found friend to
be filled with contradictions, but so too does Toomer perceive that Michael is
a far more flexible being that he imagines himself to be.
Both locked in their delusions of what the real world is, have denied
themselves a plethora of other possibilities. And as they hug upon Michael’s
departure, the often cynical Toomer even opens himself enough emotion to
release a small torrent of pent-up tears. Both will return to their cultures
with fewer of the delusions they have lived with, accepting some truths about
themselves to which they had never before admitted.
Los Angeles, October 21, 2020
Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (October
2020).
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