Varie
Film in concorso alla XIII edizione di ASIATICA FILM MEDIALE, Roma, via dei Mille, il 5 ottobre 2012 ore 20)
——————
Returning to the role that won him TFF’s Best Actor award in Eytan Fox’s Yossi & Jagger in 2003, Ohad Knoller gives another extraordinary performance as Yossi, a closeted gay man living a solitary existence in Tel Aviv. A perennially sad, workaholic doctor, Yossi has his quiet world shaken when a middle-aged woman walks out of his past and into his examination room. Their brief but emotionally charged reunion unnerves Yossi enough to make him spontaneously leave Tel Aviv. On the desolate roads of southern Israel, a chance encounter with a group of lively soldiers ignites Yossi’s desire to awaken from his emotional slumber.
Fox directs with unmatched honesty and compassion, drawing the viewer ever-so-gently into Yossi’s disconnected world. Stark images of city life eventually give way to rolling road trip beauty, perfectly attuned to Yossi’s experience. Knoller’s remarkably nuanced performance is filled with delicate emotion that subtly shifts as Yossi’s world begins to crack open, leaving an indelible impression. Yossi is a moving film about making peace with the past in order to make way for the future. (Tribeca)
CRITICA:
At the end of 2002’s Yossi & Jagger, director Eytan Fox left us with a simple yet highly suggestive close-up of a man haunted by both grief and regret. Fox’s newest film, Yossi, picks up this man 10 years later and finds him still wrestling with inner demons. Even now, as a professional doctor, Yossi (Ohad Knoller) still grieves for Lior “Jagger” Amichai, the man with whom he carried on a secret love affair as a soldier in an Israeli army troop before he died in Yossi’s arms during combat on the Lebanese border. Worse, Yossi has yet to publicly acknowledge the affair; he remains closeted, resisting both the advances of a female colleague at the hospital and the urgings of a recently divorced male colleague, secretly trolling gay online-dating websites to get his fix.
One of Yossi’s virtues is Fox’s refusal to boil his main character down to an easy psychological framework. Fox and screenwriter Itay Segal mostly imply the reasons behind Yossi’s state of mind, trusting us to intuitively grasp the reasons behind his fragility. It helps that Knoller is a skilled enough actor who can wring maximum expressiveness out of minimal gestures; in his unkempt face and bleary eyes, Knoller allows one to see the strain of Yossi constantly bottling up his emotions.
About a quarter of the way through the film, Yossi spots an unexpected visitor at his hospital: Varda Amichai (Orly Silbersatz Banai), Lior’s mother. He arranges to see her as a patient, and then ends up driving her back home—but throughout these moments, Yossi can’t summon up the courage to admit his relationship with her son (they were both planning to come out to their respective parents before Lior died). It’s only when he shows up one morning, in regular clothes, in front of her and her husband’s house that he finally tells them the truth about their son.
Up to that point, Yossi is a fairly standard, if sensitively handled, drama about a man who’s unable to let go of the past. But as Yossi sits on Jagger’s bed and stares into space after having been invited to visit his old room by Varda’s husband, the screen dissolves into a point-of-view dolly shot of an open road, and suddenly we see Yossi driving to an as-yet-unknown location. It’s then that a relatively conventional drama blossoms into something more bracingly unstructured, the shift subtly reflecting Yossi’s own aimless quest to snap himself back to emotional life.
At a rest stop, Yossi encounters a group of four young soldiers and offers them a ride to the hotel at which they’re staying; during the car ride, he plays them a selection from the “Adagietto” movement of Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. When, after dropping them off at the hotel, Yossi impulsively decides to stay at that same hotel, we later see him sitting by a pool reading a book—identified by one of the soldiers as Death in Venice. Luchino Visconti famously used the Adagietto in his 1971 screen adaptation of Thomas Mann’s controversial novella, and considering that Yossi himself could be said to be channeling Gustav Aschenbach in the way he hangs around these younger men in a faintly creepy manner, these references are surely not incidental. Fox, however, is too warmly compassionate a filmmaker to approach Mann’s disturbing melancholy.
As he hangs around with these four party animals, Yossi develops a particular interest in one of the four: Tom (Oz Zehavi), an openly gay soldier who has much of the same energy and passion that Yossi found so appealing about Jagger. Their tentative budding romance more indirectly recalls last year’s acclaimed gay-themed romance Weekend. Yossi shares with Andrew Haigh’s film a tender, deeply romantic sensibility that gradually leads to a climactic scene of soaring emotion. The climax of Fox’s film points the way toward some sort of resurrection for his protagonist—though the nature of that resurrection is something the film ultimately leaves open. It shows just how successful Yossi is in making us care about its main character that its final cut to black leaves you genuinely curious about whether or not a crucial life decision he makes does indeed mark a positive new stage in his life. (KENJI FUJISHIMA, slantmagazine.com)
——————————————–
INTERVISTA
TRIBECA: Tell us a little about YOSSI. How do you describe the movie in your own words?
EYTAN FOX: Well, YOSSI is a follow up to a film I made 10 years ago called YOSSI & JAGGER. It’s a character study of Yossi, of his psyche and soul. As the film starts, he is still suffering from post-traumatic stress due to the death of his lover during the war. He remains in the closet, so he also at war with himself. As a cardiologist, he has essentially exchanged one army for another, because being a doctor also involves consistently dealing with crises and difficult issues. You even have a uniform!
Ultimately, the film is about Yossi eventually processing the horrible things that have happened to him, things he has long repressed, and finding ways to escape the very difficult places that he has been in for years. He finally discovers a new way to define himself and create a new life.
TRIBECA: What inspired you to revisit the character of Yossi from your previous film YOSSI & JAGGER?
EYTAN FOX: It was actually my students who inspired me. I teach a master class in cinema at NYU–Tel Aviv—one of NYU’s satellite campuses. In all my classes, I show my film and television work as teaching tools. When I showed YOSSI & JAGGER, the students asked me “What happened to Yossi? Who would he be today?” So I got to thinking about Yossi 10 years after I made the film and realized that the whole world has changed. I asked myself whether Yossi managed to change with the world and, if so, what happened to his gay identity. I had to get to know Yossi all over again.
I’m close with Ohad Knoller, who played Yossi in the first film, and I started working with him to see where Yossi was today. That was very interesting. Ohad was hesitant to return to the character at first; however, we both realized that we had a very deep connection with Yossi. We could imagine him in a very bad place, and we wanted to help him reach a better place.
TRIBECA: Ohad Knoller won the Best Actor Prize at Tribeca in 2003 for his role as Yossi in YOSSI & JAGGER, so choosing him to reprise the role was inevitable. Could you talk about the rest of the casting process for YOSSI?
EYTAN FOX: I was determined to surround Ohad with the finest actors in Israel today. We just had such a terrific cast. One of Israel’s most prominent actors, Lior Ashknazi, who did WATER ON WATER with me and appeared in the Oscar nominated FOOTNOTE, plays Yossi’s colleague. Oz Zehavi is Israel’s newest heartthrob and is a very good actor as well. I knew that he’d be great as Tom. I could go on, but I’ll stop myself there.
TRIBECA: Speaking of Tom, Tom and Yossi had such an interesting, complex relationship. Tom was so open with his sexuality, while Yossi still had the same mindset as he did when he was in the army 10 years previously. Can you talk about the development of these two characters?
EYTAN FOX: Israel has changed. The Israel that I grew up in was a very macho-military state. Going into the army was a part of everyone’s life; you were expected to become a tough Israeli solider. That was part of our upbringing and identity. There was no way out of it. You were usually sent to a fighting unit, like Yossi, like Jagger, like Tom. You had to be tough, you had to be strong, and you had to be straight. The possibility of being gay was not even considered.
In Israel today, the army itself has changed. Now there are openly gay commanders in the army, and YOSSI & JAGGER actually has become one of the films that soldiers watch during basic training. YOSSI & JAGGER did a wonderful job of opening people’s minds and making the army more tolerant. In many ways, I think that the film has allowed a character like Tom to exist as a different soldier. He’s an openly gay man and very sure of himself. He’s part of a group of soldiers who are really macho, and he’s able to hold his own and bond with them. He’s not looking for anyone when he meets Yossi, but gradually the two begin to form a bond.
TRIBECA: Describe your collaborative process with screenwriter Itay Segal. Why did you choose him to write the second part of your Yossi series?
EYTAN FOX: In all my films, I usually come up with the story and characters, and after that, I bring in a collaborator to write the screenplay. I followed this process in Yossi as well. Itay is an amazing writer and friend, and we worked very hard to find the story, characters and structure together. He is a television critic for one of Israel’s biggest newspapers, but he assured me he could find time to write the script. When we got close to the day that shooting was to begin, I had not heard from him. I told him, “This is not going to be like one of your columns where you finish it and the next day it will be published. A screenplay has to be close to 100 pages!” Itay said that he was very used to deadlines, and very soon after he presented me with a 90-page screenplay that is almost exactly what we shot. He did a very good job.
TRIBECA: What’s the craziest thing (or “lightning strikes” moment) that happened during production?
EYTAN FOX: First of all, I don’t want to insult any other actors of mine or characters of mine, but I don’t think I’ve ever loved a character as much as Yossi as played by Ohad. I’m so proud of our accomplishment together as actor and director. When I came to the editing room, I saw things that Ohad did that I didn’t even notice on set. Actually, the first scene we shot in the movie was that sequence where Yossi is sitting in the bar, listening to this wonderful Israeli singer, his eyes filled with tears. Then Oz comes and sits next to him, showing that Tom has chosen Yossi over his partying fellow soldiers. I said to Ohad, “If you become this teary before Tom sits next to you, people are going to think their story is over. Don’t become so emotional.”
I was worried that we still had more story to tell before the two ended up together! Ohad said, “It’s not about Tom. It’s about Yossi processing the story of Jagger. Will this new life be with Tom? Maybe, but it’s not yet decided.” We finally came to a compromise. I don’t know if you noticed, but in that scene, Ohad tears up just a bit and then represses the emotion almost instantly. When that is happening, Tom sits down next to him. Therefore, it’s not the end of the story. There is still that question of “Will they or won’t they?”
TRIBECA: One of the recurring themes in YOSSI is that of journeys.What do you want audiences to take away from your film?
EYTAN FOX: I think most American films are big on taglines, so I have some for YOSSI. “It’s never too late to start your life” or “It’s never to too late to start again.” These might seem like clichés, but it takes a lot of hard work to change your life. You have to understand what you need to change, be brave and work to love yourself.
TRIBECA: As a returning TFF alum, what are you most looking forward to at Tribeca?
EYTAN FOX: Well, I was born in New York, so it’s just a great excuse to visit [laughs]. It’s such a fun Festival. I love Tribeca. YOSSI & JAGGER was my first time here in 2003. In 2007, I was here with BUBBLE, and it’s always interesting to see how the Festival keeps evolving. I saw the program for this year and think it’s just wonderful. Plus, this is my first world premiere at Tribeca. The idea of seeing YOSSI with Ohad and the rest of our collaborators with an audience at Tribeca for the world premiere is thrilling for me.
TRIBECA: If you could have dinner with any filmmaker (alive or dead), who would it be?
EYTAN FOX: This is a difficult question. Robert Altman would be one. I remember seeing NASHVILLE and MCCABE & MRS. MILLER as a child and knowing that I wanted to direct films when I grew up. Even though she’s not a filmmaker, I would love to share a meal with Pauline Kael. I grew up reading her film criticism. My mother used to get THE NEW YORKER from the States when I was a child. In Israel, it would come by boat almost two months after the issue was published, but we didn’t care. I used to read the movie section so that’s how I learned about film.
TRIBECA: What’s your favorite New York movie?
EYTAN FOX: This will sound like a banal answer, but it has to be Woody Allen’s MANHATTAN.
TRIBECA: What would your biopic be called?
EYTAN FOX: My real name is Ethan Samuel Fox, and when we moved to Israel, my mother used to call me Sam. Sammy was not an Israeli name and kids used to make fun of me when I was growing up. So I decided to go by “Eytan” which is the Israeli version of Ethan. There was this book I had when I was growing up called WHAT MAKES SAMMY RUN and that would make a good title. FANTASTIC MR. FOX was made already, so I couldn’t use that. [laughs].
TRIBECA: What makes YOSSI a Tribeca must-see?
EYTAN FOX: How would you answer that without sounding pretentious [laughs]? I would say they should see it for Ohad Knoller’s performance. I’m just so impressed and moved by what he did with the character of Yossi again, ten years later.
Ok, visto di fila con il primo e la cosa che ho pensato per gran parte di questo film era: fermate questo massacro.
Non che sia un brutto film, anzi, mi è piaciuto molto. Il massacro da fermare per me era la vita di Yossi, un uomo perenemmente solo, affranto, triste, pensieroso. Faceva male al cuore solo a vederlo sullo schermo.
La rappresentazione fisica del concetto di MAINAGIOIA.
Scherzi a parte, il film riprende la vita di Yossi a dieci anni dalla morte del suo compagno sotto le armi. Dieci anni e il dolore è ancora talmente forte che il protagonista non ha fatto altro che trascinarsi nella vita senza mai trarne nulla se non una laurea in medicina e un conseguente lavoro.
Una vita di dolore e sofferenza…fino agli ultimi cinque minuti di film dove, non solo riprende in mano le redini della sua vita, ma la sconvolge anche come pochi farebbero mai.
Tenerissima la scena finale nella camera d’albergo. L’attore protagonista è davvero molto bravo, non ha bisogno di parole per farti affondare pienamente nel male di vivere.
Rischiosissimo fare il sequel di un film cult. Eppure Eytan Fox ci prova e ci azzecca, creando un’opera che completa mirabilmente Yossi e Yagger, riuscendo a descrivere en passant l’evoluzione della civiltà israeliana tra i due film.
Questo Yossi è diviso nettamente in due parti quasi uguali: la prima è cristallizzata ai tragici eventi di 10 anni prima (Yossi, i genitori di Jagger), la seconda guarda all’oggi rappresentato dal gruppo di giovani soldati. Yossi ci mette un po’ ma alla fine riesce ad andare avanti ed entrare pienamente nella seconda parte.
Questo film non potrebbe esistere senza l’interpretazione magistrale di Ohad Knoller, circondato da un gruppo di bravi comprimari. Fox poi è abilissimo a risaltare tutte le emozioni dei personaggi con pochi tratti e renderle vive ed urgenti.
La scena a letto tra Yossi e Tom è insieme dolcissima e molto erotica. Voto 10.
Bravo Eytan Fox. Uno dei rari casi in cui il seguito è migliore del primo film.
La vita di ogni giorno e la tristezza, spesso camminano insieme, basta poco perchè queste due strade si separino: la pozione è l’amore!
La quotidianità e la malinconia sono le protagoniste del film, una malinconia che logora le viscere sino a
isolare completamente il personaggio di Yossi. La tristezza è palpabile come se fosse “vera” nel racconto, perdere un grande amore è davvero devastante ma farne, di quest’ultimo, una malattina non aiuta sicuramente a migliorare lo stato mentale. Bravo, bravo Ohad Knoller, ingrassato 20kg per questo ruolo, mi è piagiuto molto di più del prequel!
Ma Lior Ashkenazi deve per contratto mostrare l’uccello in tutti i suoi film? Se è così mi scarico l’intera sua filmografia perché lo trovo sexy da morire…
Chiusa la parentesi finocchia, devo dire che concordo abbastanza con l’amico pal39, eccetto che io preferisco YOSSI a WEEKEND. Proprio per le “melensaggini” effettivamente presenti (ma non gratuite) quali la colonna sonora e il deserto israeliano sullo sfondo. Ho trovato molto toccanti tre scene:
– Yossi è in macchina con la madre del suo primo amore che, ignara, gli mostra la foto di suo figlio.
– Nel locale Yossi ascolta commosso le parole della cantante e, proprio in quel momento, arriva il giovane soldato e si siede accanto a lui.
-Yossi indugia… ha paura di spogliarsi di fronte a Tom.
Chi ha visto Yossi e Jagger non può non vedere il seguito. Chi non l’ha visto dovrebbe guardare prima il capitolo precedente. Si tratta infatti di un raro caso in cui due film sono essenziali per cogliere l’intero svilppo narrativo.
Questo sequel di “Yossi & Yagger” mi è piaciuto molto. Con “Weekend” è il più bel film d’amore che ho visto nel 2012 , senza sdolcinature e senza melensaggini ma così toccante nella sua semplicità da piacere molto , credo , anche a gran parte di voi. Yossi , timido , chiuso e riservato ha la vita come svuotata dopo la morte del suo esuberante amico finchè il caso gli dà una nuova chance con un nuovo incontro nell’atmosfera solare del deserto israeliano. Eytan Fox ancora una volta sa creare una storia con raffinata semplicità e sensibilità , sa trasmettere calore e emozione , anche aiutato dalla magnifica recitazione di Ohad Knoller. Da vedere . Voto 9.