Yariv Mozer | שבלולים בגשם (Shablulim BaGeshem) Snails in the Rain / 2013

sweating it

by Douglas Messerli

 

Yariv Mozer (screenwriter, based on a story by Yossi Avni Levy, and director) שבלולים בגשם (Shablulim BaGeshem) Snails in the Rain / 2013

 

About a decade ago this week Yariv Mozer’s Snails in the Rain made its premiere in Israel. The reviews were mixed, but no one could ignore its devastatingly beautiful male star, Yoav Reuveni playing the central character Boaz, for whom Mozer finds every occasion possible for him to pull off his shirt and whip up a sweat. People are constantly bumping up against him, likely intentionally just to be get near to this hunk—or is he intentionally bumping into them, the male runners and locker room mates.

     Yet Boaz is no dumb hunk, but is a linguistics major at the university who is expecting soon to hear about a scholarship, which is the reason why he haunts the local post box outlet. We follow him also as he swims, as he works moving furniture to extend his small student income, follow him into the classroom where he is studying primarily with Professor Richlin (performed by the director himself), and settle down with him as he returns home each evening to be with his girlfriend Noa (Moran Rosenblatt) with whom Boaz has a seemingly close sexual and emotional relationship.

     Yet despite Boaz and Noa’s nearly perfect pairing, we sense something amiss. Noa is applying for a scholarship of her own in architecture in a city elsewhere from Jerusalem where Boaz hopes to study, and she has not shared that information with her lover.

      Moreover, Boaz has begun to receive letters from an unknown male admirer, expressing his deep but frustrated love for him. Not only does this unknown figure apparently know a great deal about him, but is watching him day and night. The very idea of a stalker, who this obsessed figure appears to be, is enough to send anyone into a spin; and Boaz, saving the letters and hiding them from Noa, seems almost traumatized by the event, now carefully observing every male who often, simply because of his beauty, are cruising him. His best friend Nir (Yehuda Nahari) even seems suspect in his friendly roughhousing and his sudden “bro” kisses.

      But quite soon we begin to suspect that something deeper is bothering Boaz. As blogger Marlon Wallace astutely observes: “…Everywhere Boaz goes, he catches attention from both guys and girls. It's no wonder as he is an absolutely beautiful, young man, gorgeous beyond compare. The issue though is that Boaz notices the people who notice him, but only if those people are other men. Some women do double-takes when Boaz walks by, but Boaz never sees them. He only sees the guy on the night jog, or the guy on the bus, the guy in the locker room, the guy in the library, the guy at the cafe and the guy at college.”

       The very fact that he saves these letters, moreover, and reads them over and over again, suggests that he is fascinated by the mysterious sender. And we soon begin to suspect that there is another deeper emotional response at work here. So too does Noa, when she discovers the letters and reads them for herself, obviously feeling that her companion is under some sort of deep tension. Just as Boaz often seeks solace in sex with Noa, so does she continually attempt to keep him close, masturbating him in the bathtub and even accommodating his brutal anal rape of her one day when he returns home filled with fear and frustration.

      Meanwhile, the tension is beginning to show in the outside world as well, as Boaz pulls away from men who watch him in the shower and almost beats up a young man attempting to display his penis to him in a urinal.

      Mozer also keeps interspersing scenes from Boaz’s compulsory military service. There, among only men, his beauty was also noticed. Not a particularly model soldier, he nonetheless was given leeway just for his looks, and at one point a fellow soldier whom he had just voyeuristically watched make love to a woman engages him in a series of deep, long kisses, which Boaz at first rejects but returns to accept.

    What we begin to realize is that Boaz is gay or at least bisexual, and the pulls he feels toward homosexuality are terrifying him as he attempts to resist them while still increasingly moving toward them. At one point, the letter writer begs him to show him that his love is not meaningless by switching on and off the kitchen light 3 times at precisely 10:00. Noa has also read the letter and attempts to distract him with a late dinner and movie; nonetheless, Boaz finds an excuse—a sudden desire for leftovers—to return to the kitchen. There he does, in fact, switch the light on and off two times, but overcomes his compulsion before making the third connection, sending the poor letter writer, whose identity Noa has already uncovered for us, into utter despair.

      But so too is Boaz ready for a near complete breakdown, as he races out of the house and hurries off to a gay sex spot in a park where he allows a beefy man to masturbate him, returning home to immediately take a shower, trying to wash the “dirty” act away as he breaks into tears.    

     Yet everything is okay now. The dark urges have passed. He’s won his scholarship and he still has retained Noa’s love. His professor, the writer of those nasty letters, has left the university due to “an illness.”

      We all know that different cultures are dealing with LGBTQ+ experiences in different ways and at different speeds. And even today, despite a substantial number of gay filmmakers—including the radical Amos Gutman, to whom this film is dedicated—who have opened up new a sexual frankness regarding gay cinema, Israel, with its governmental forces aligned closely with religious tenants is still not an easy place to openly discuss gay issues. But frankly, as effective and brilliant as this film is, I, as one of the letterboxd commentators writes: “am growing a little fatigued with queer cinema coming back to the effects of self-loathing and internalized homophobia as seemingly the only tools for telling dramatically compelling stories about the culture. There has to be someone out there interested in telling a queer story that doesn't fall into miserabilism.”

      Moreover, I am increasingly skeptic and even somewhat incensed by films that allow their troubled male gay boys to pretend that they are able to resist the pull of their sexual desires by marrying a woman like Noa, as this film suggests, and have children who grow up in a loving marital atmosphere—those icky, slimy snails being only something that come out on rainy days, mostly long left behind. But as gay cinema has often reminded us, boys who enter closed heterosexual relationships are often so frustrated that they end up in public bathrooms and the bushes to where Boaz has run to satisfy their needs until even that doesn’t work. Their children suffer and their marriages often end, as does Nir’s relationship, in despair.

      And even in Mozer’s film, as Boaz hugs his young daughter close to him, a pregnant Noa coming to join in the hug fest, he is last seen staring off into space as if seeking out something in his life that is still missing and which he will not allow himself to seek.

      Perhaps this film can be described as an honest one that still frustrates those of us who seen so much of gay behavior that continues to close off and sublimate its desires instead of opening up to a wider view of sexual activity. It’s painful to watch a man throw away freedoms that for more than a century now have been hard fought for and won.

 

Los Angeles, June 27, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2023).