In the opening sequence of Walk On Water, the new film from Yossi & Jagger director Eytan Fox, star Lior Ashkenazi establishes that his character is single-minded about doing his job, and capable of doing it well. While relaxing on an Istanbul boat tour, he takes in the sights, smiles at a child, then disappears into the bathroom and prepares a syringe. After disembarking, he finds the child's family, discreetly pumps the dad full of poison, then disappears into a car waiting to whisk him back to Tel Aviv, where an inner circle of Israel's Mossad will applaud him as a hero for assassinating a Hamas leader.
Killing is Ashkenazi's business, and it doesn't bother him. In fact, he appears not to reflect on it, or any of his beliefs, until his wife's suicide shocks him out of his routine and an unusual assignment forces him into self-reflection. Going undercover as a tour guide, Ashkenazi escorts young German teacher Knut Berger through Israel as Berger visits his sister Caroline Peters, whom he hasn't seen since she left home for life on a kibbutz. They're nice people, but Ashkenazi knows a family secret that they might not: Their grandfather was a Nazi commander who might still be alive in South America.
Fox treats the film like a low-key version of The Crying Game, turning big political issues into a little personal story in which uneasy friendships form in spite of (or maybe because of) differences in ethnicity, national history, and sexual identity. Ashkenazi can't quite get comfortable with Berger's homosexuality—which he's comically slow to recognize—and despises Berger's willingness to see Palestinians as anything other than animals. The tensions boil when Berger picks up an Arab lover at a dance club, but Fox, who co-scripted the film with longtime collaborator Gal Uchovsky, never lets them explode. Mostly, he wants his characters to talk it out while acknowledging the difficulty of keeping a level head in a place where suicide bombings have become a fact of everyday life, complete with tired public rituals that do nothing to ease the pain. Walk On Water is at its best when the plot matters least, and at its worst in a final act that attempts to find a resolution for a story that has no easy ending. When it unexpectedly shifts back into its initial thriller mode, Walk On Water loses in human drama what it gains in tidiness, revealing itself as a film that carries more weight in its light scenes than its heavy moments can sustain.