how to move
by
Douglas Messerli
Amos
Guttman and Edna Mazia (screenplay), Amos Guttman (director) נגוע (Nagu'a)
(Drifting) / 1982
This
discussion is particularly painful for me. In a country where gay marriage is
still not permitted because of the Jewish Orthodox religious values, but
recognizes gay marriage taking place elsewhere, a young 28-year old filmmaker,
who had previously directed three short films, one of which was earlier version
of Drifting, tried to express on film a viewpoint that was far too radical for
his own countrymen and even New York critics such as the haughty The New York
Times reviewer Janet Maslin could comprehend. If he has since become a legend
in Israeli cinema, he is still unknown to most US and perhaps even European
film enthusiasts. Just to watch this film immediately brings tears to my eyes.
Even the film blurb says it all without
saying anything at all: “A young gay Israeli man works in his grandmother's
store while dreaming of becoming a film-maker.”
That is most certainly the truth. But it
says nothing of his, the character in the film Robi’s (Jonathan Sagalle)
feelings, his longings, his own self-hate, the mess he is making of his own
life.
He has moved into his grandmother’s house
only because she is the most accepting homophobe he knows, and turns away from
the fact that when he brings young men he meets in Tel Aviv’s gay night
cruising grounds, Independence Park (Gan Ha'atzmaut), she looks away—clearly
with disgust—but generally with no comment. It is a familiar version of “Don’t
ask, don’t tell,” even if at several moments in the film she does explode with
her hatred of his behavior.
But there is a limit, and the night he
meets up with three young innocents from Haifa, Han (Ami Traub), Ezri (Ben
Levin) and Rachel (Dita Arel), who have missed their bus home and have no
money, there is a limit. Robi is attracted less for the far more flamboyant Han
than he is to Ezri, who he takes aside for a blow job, voyeuristically enjoyed
by other park participants. But the trio are all without a place to stay for
the night, and beg him for a place to stay for the night. He reluctantly allows
them to crash at his grandmother’s house.
Actually, the story goes nowhere from
there. Robi tentatively falls for Ezri, but doesn’t pursue the relationship. He
is far more interested in his career as a filmmaker. These three figures show
up again in a gay bar encounter, and Robi abuses them by making the two males
strip and engage in a sexual act while pretending he is directing them in his
imaginary movie, actually abusing them in forcing them to pretend sex as if it
might be a film, even though he assures them they will never appear in his
imaginary movie.
In fact, Robi’s filmmaking seems to be
mostly an imaginary act since he can get so financial support and is turned
down again and again by all the organizations which might support such
independent filmmaker, including the major Israeli organization on whose site I
paid for permission to watch this remarkable film.
Later, he even invites in two Arab boys,
on-the-run terrorists, one severely injured. He engages in sex with one of the
men, playing the role of a passive and dismissive whore, standing against the
wall and pulling down his underwear to attract a male who could never admit he
was a homosexual.
This is the final limit for his previously
accepting grandmother, who refuses to any longer host the two dangerous
outsiders. For Robi, all of his friends are outsiders, people not permitted in
his society.
When it was shown briefly in 1984 in the
US, Maslin dismissed it, her review stating its hostility in its first
sentences:
“The
chief character in Amos Guttman's Drifting, which opens today at the 8th
Street Playhouse, is a desultory would-be film maker. ''I'm busy with my film
right now'' is the sort of thing he likes to say, although during the course of
Drifting his only activities related to film making are to wonder how he can
raise some money and muse about whether it would be worthwhile to dramatize the
life of Ramon Novarro.”
What she can’t imagine, apparently, is
that the movie itself is its own statement, a film about the very concerns the
young would be direction might have had as a frightened Israeli filmmaker. He
has indeed made the movie, and we are witnessing the process that went into
that remarkable result? The blindness of her statements, and those of others of
the day, can only frustrate those of us who enjoy his art. This is a movie, for
god’s sake, about its own making. It’s not a profound perception; the movie
itself states it over and over again. The imaginary becomes real through our
encounter with it.
And, frankly, this is a desultory and
problematic experience for the young director working in a world which is quite
hostile. He himself cannot fully accept the love of even those he seeks, such
as the beautiful Ezri. He tries to resolve his own confusion with a female
partner. This is a messy film about the problems, even the ridiculousness of
trying to be gay in a society which is not at all fully able in those days.
Guttman was a rough rebel who even today is exceptional, the current major gay
filmmaker, Eytan Fox declaring quite insistently that he is not going to
explore the territory of this innovative director, seeking for more
assimilative ground.
Things don’t go easy in Drifting.
All the characters are lost and seeking some sort of temporary respite. Robi is
allowed only by his grandmother’s ability to generally look away from what she
perceives as despicable, simply out of love for her own kind.
Despite his now sacred position in Israeli
gay cinema, Guttman’s earliest film seems, at least in English, to have little
valid commentary.
The best we get is from Bobby Karmi in a
Letterboxd review from 2023, commentary which is actually quite brilliant and
moving. I quote at length its first three paragraphs for their truly accurate
and concise perception of the depths of this early film:
“Drifting
offers such a precise moment in queer film history that it's hard to not
somehow become enraptured with its specificness and novelty as a cultural
artifact in place of it as an aesthetic one as well. It is at once a work of
early queer New Wave very intentionally about an attempt to capture an
authentic queer experience in a way that may not be palatable to the status
quo, literally represented in the first scene as a young would-be filmmaker
discusses his own ambitions to create queer art that doesn't try to moralize
his sexuality or to appease the status quo of an inherently homophobic Israeli
government (one that still won’t perform marriages in its borders, for the
record), but instead to create something meaningful and personal to the artist
that may resonate with others who have lived similar experiences. It is a
portrait of a lonely young man attempting meaningful connections yet confined
to one-night stands when all that is available is an unorganized and amorphous
queer scene that hardly protects itself, all the while being hounded by an
“accepting” but nonetheless deeply homophobic family that cannot understand his
desires either romantically or professionally.
It is a work of long nighttime walks in
dark parks so as to find someone only then able to be out in public about their
queerness without fear of violence against them, as shown later on in the film
during a scene in which Robi attempts to solicit a former colleague in broad
daylight and is met with discomfort and further ostracization. It's a work of
strained familial and platonic connections as people ebb and flow into each
other's lives as money becomes increasingly difficult to come across and as
love begins to strain as apathy and indifference manifest. It is ultimately a
bleak, profoundly lonely work about queerness and alienation, but it is one
that I feel increasingly drawn to. Its director, Amos Guttman, is something of
a missing link from the flamboyant and wonderfully designed but nevertheless
socially conscious satires of Rainer Werner Fassbender and the beat neck lonely
young outsiders of Gus Van Sant, both in terms of aesthetics of detailed
mise-en-scene and overtly political themes and discussion of them (Robi as he
introduces his film he struggles to make looks directly into the camera
challenging us to object to his art while going against seemingly every
neo-liberal sentiment in regards to queer art) and frank depictions of loneliness
and eroticism.
For the importance of this connective
tissue, I worry that Guttman is being forgotten beyond the specific context of
Israeli queer cinema, Guttman often being seen as the first out filmmaker to
create films on the subject. Part of this could be accessibility, as I’ve
noticed how hard it is to come across any Israeli film that isn’t a war film or
something made by a contemporary auteur, but I do think it is because he
touched nerves in a way that few filmmakers do, making nonjudgemental films
about these subjects living in a barely legal state. His work is profound in
its depictions of existential loneliness and the attempts of political
subversion within Israeli society, going against the presumed status quo even
on an aesthetic level, preferring something more ornate and colorful to the
social realism that defined and continues to define the dominant cinematic
Israeli aesthetic. Likewise, this is a deeply unconventional film, with a
dominant theme of stagnation and an inability to make progress due to either
self-destructive or outward forces that don’t comfortably show everything
working out in the end, with only slight material gain made by Robi via a
donation from his absent mother. I look at this movie and I see the difficulty
of getting out of a rut, of coming of age again as an adult as you continually
make steps to try and become the person you are meant to be only for it to come
crashing down and mundane tragedy, forced to endure emotional constipation as
second puberty racks your mind and your emotions.”
No, this is not a great film; this is a film
about a film-in-the-making that shows us what it is to become a filmmaker in a
society that no one wants in a world that is always slightly askew from what
you perceive reality to be. This film spins out of logic into the perception
that any gay man knows to be his daily life, never quite what the ordinary he
imagines, a vertigo that will never disappear no matter how hard he tries. How
do you move forward?: you make a movie about how difficult it is to even move.
Los
Angeles, July 17, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (July 2026).
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