Of course, it would follow that an Israeli filmmaker would center his films mostly around dichotomies, doubles, and impasses. Popular gay filmmaker Eytan Fox, whose previous two films, Yossi and Jagger and Walk on Water, enjoyed healthy limited-run success in the U.S., returns with The Bubble, and again proves that his strengths lie in establishing tender, fraught human relationships within volatile settings. Fox has a sharp ear and an open heart, and his characters' interactions are never less than believable, their struggles plainspoken and heartrending. Yet in shuttling these fragile souls through stock tragic frameworks, he sometimes undermines them, both personally and politically; though The Bubble makes for a mostly impassioned liberal plea, Fox's need to spin its central gay romance into a star-crossed present-day "West Bank Story" leads him to fall into some unnecessary stereotyping. Which is unfortunate since there's so much loveliness in The Bubble.
Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky's review of Eytan Fox's The Bubble.