Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon | Hofesh Gadol (Summer Vacation) / 2012

lifesaver

by Douglas Messerli

 

Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon (screenwriters and director) Hofesh Gadol (Summer Vacation) / 2012 [22.18 minutes]

 

Vacationing with his wife, Michaela (Hilla Vidor), his daughter Gaya (Bar Miniely), and son Einav (Ruslan Levchuk), Yuval (Yiftach Klein) appears to be totally enjoying the sea-side location. As a bronze-winning swimmer, Yuval swims long distances around the beach where he and his family have a small tourist cottage. But when his children and wife bury him in the sand with only his head remaining above the surface, he is almost drowned in the quickly returning tides. As his wife and sun desperately attempt to dig him free, his daughter rushes to other seaside visitors, two men Yiftach (Oded Leopold) and Noam (Ido Bartal) coming to his rescue.

     During their life-saving activities we observe a look of a deep interchange between Yuval and Yiftach in the process, and afterwards, despite his wife’s invitation to the two lifesavers to join in dinner, Yuval barely talks to either of them.

      As Michaela, enchanted when the handsome Yiftach dances to music from his cellphone, Noam who has stayed back with Yuval notices that the cellphone message that comes up with that song details Yuval’s recognition that his new boyfriend Yiftach has evidently had a close relationship with the man he helped to save, and that Yuval’s and his wife’s song is actually Yiftach and Yuval’s “song.”

       By the second day, we realize that indeed the married Yuval and Yiftach have long had a gay relationship, and Yuval is obviously furious to encounter his secret love at the very place where he has long taken his wife and family to summer at the end of every August. Is Yiftach stalking him? He finds it hard to believe that a gay couple such Yiftach and Noam would have chosen such a family-based location.

       In fact, Noam has left, returning back to the city, perhaps because of what he has observed on the phone or simply because he and Yiftach are not a serious couple. And as the days pass, particularly when Yuval observes his former gay friend in deep conversation with his son on a small wooden raft, things become more tense.

       When Michaela notices a small hickey on Einav’s neck, Yuval rushes over to Yiftach’s  cottage and attacks him, demanding that he stay away from his son. But later when he discovers the boy in close conversation with a local girl, he realizes that he was misled in his fears and returns to Yiftach to apologize. During that meeting, however, he confesses his continued love for Yiftach and two cannot resist a fulfilling sexual encounter.

      Yuval promises him that when they return home, he will again make contact with Yiftach, but his lover refuses, in insists, to take his friend’s “sloppy seconds.”

       When soon after he discovers Yiftach massaging sun lotion into his wife’s back on the beach, and overhears the man’s description of his own true lover whom he even compares to Yuval, he again becomes furious. When Yiftach mentions that his lover, however, is not a couch potato like Yuval, he challenges Yiftach in a race to a small rocky island offshore where the two escape to kiss and attempt to resolve the growing tension of the situation.

       It ends, however, with Yiftach finally daring his lover to make his wife aware of the situation so that she might show whether she truly loves Yuval as much as he claims he loves her. Jumping in the water to return to shore, he appears to be on his way to tell the truth to Michaela. Terrified, Yuval quickly follows midway grabbing him and bringing him down under the surface, appearing to attempt to drown him.

     As he returns to shore, it is clear that Yuval is in something like shock, which even his wife notices along with the look on his face the long scratches on his neck and shoulder. We expect the worst, but suddenly Yiftach also returns sitting back down beside them to put pull out his phone and call his number revealing that the page calls up the name of Yuval, a fact that finally Michaela herself observes, and like Noam before her must now make a decision to leave or go on pretending to be part of a perfectly happy family on summer vacation. But we can never truly know whether in so acting Yiftach has wrecked a happy home or once more served as his ex-lover’s lifesaver.

     Although Israeli writers and directors’ Tal Granit and Sharon Maymon’s short film does not introduce a new issue—there are dozens of such films of a genre I might describe as the “the married bisexual’s showdown,”* the melodrama of Summer Vacation is well presented, the acting of high quality compared with the usual LGBTQ shorts, and the cinematography of Shai Peleg quite excellent.

      As one commentator on the Mubi site where this film was featured put it, “Just scratch the surface and watch everything go to pieces in slow motion.”

 

*Other movies that similarly reveal the problem of men and women coming to terms with their LGBTQ sexualities later in their lives, at a time when the consequences are far more serious, include Atom Egoyan’s The Adjuster (1991), Nigel Finch’s The Lost Language of Cranes (1991) Ben McCormack’s Family Outing (2001), Todd Haynes’ Far From Heaven (2002), Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain (2005), Monte Patterson’s Caught (2011), Venci Kostov’s The Son (2012), Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015), Tanuj Bhrama’s Dear Dad (2016), and Maj Jukic’s My Dad Marie (2020) to name just a few.

        

Los Angeles, April 28, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).