Living In "The Bubble"
They're young, they're hip, they're twenty-something. They hang in cafés, check email and cellphones 24/7, and go looking for love (or at least a great one-night stand) in all the wrong places.
In "The Bubble," three friends share an apartment in Tel Aviv, in a neighborhood that could easily pass for chic-and-desirable in New York, San Francisco, London or Paris. But in Tel Aviv, alongside their morning lattes and newspapers, each day brings Lulu, Noam and Yali - one straight woman, two gay men -- the tensions of life in Israel and the threat of violence that could at any moment shatter their existence.
Lulu sells soap in a fancy boutique and longs for a relationship with the dark and sexy Time Out editor who stopped calling after the night she finally consented to his sexual advances. The sensitive and brooding Noam sells CDs in an alternative music store during the week; on weekends he serves in the National Guard at an Israeli checkpoint.
Yali, who manages a trendy café, adopts a devil-may-care attitude toward life and love. Aside from organizing a beach rave to end the Palestinian occupation (or, if that fails, have a great party by the sea that lasts through the night), the three do their best to avoid politics.
That is, until politics shows up at their door in the form of Ashraf, a Palestinian who noticed Noam at the checkpoint. The two take to each other instantly.
Ashraf moves into the flat, and since he doesn't have the proper papers to allow him to live in Tel Aviv, the friends allow him to live "undercover." He adopts a Hebrew name, and Yali gives him a job at the café.
"The Bubble," which recently opened in New York and will open in other cities this fall, takes its name from the term Israelis often use to describe life in Tel Aviv.
"I think young people in Israel today find reality too difficult to handle," says Eytan Fox, the film's director. "I can't blame them. Young people are not supposed to be dealing with war and occupation and terrorism. They're supposed to be learning about life, meeting people, falling in love, going to university."
Fox is 43; he was born in New York, grew up in Jerusalem and studied film in Tel Aviv, where he now lives. He served in the Army as a paratrooper.
"When I left the Army, people were going to South America ¬to explore nature, to explore its vast areas, and to escape Israel, which is claustrophobic. Now they're going to India, to ashrams, to practice Buddhism, or take drugs like mad.
"When they come back to Israel," Fox continued, "they need a place to come back to which is not like their Army service. So they have Tel Aviv. It's not Jerusalem, a historical and religious mecca with this heavy weight on its shoulders. Tel Aviv is modern, secular, cool, up-to-date, supposedly disconnected from what's happening in the Middle East. The bubble."
The film, which Fox wrote with his partner Gal Uchovsky (a prominent gay rights advocate in Israel), is his sixth. His previous works include "Yossi & Jagger," the story of a secret love affair between two Army officers stationed on the Israeli-Lebanese border, and "Walk on Water," about a Mossad agent sent on assignment to find a Nazi war criminal in hiding and along the way befriends the man's gay grandson.
"Yossi & Jagger" started out as a "small TV drama, which became a phenomenon," said Goel Pinto, a cultural correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, speaking by phone from Tel Aviv, which Pinto says is one of "the centers of the world for gay people. The film was very, very moving. Eytan Fox is part of the new generation of Israeli cinema, and this is a great time for our film industry."
This year, the country's filmmakers took home major prizes from the Sundance, Berlin and Cannes film festivals.
Perhaps surprisingly, "the gay theme is not something that people are talking about when they talk about Eytan Fox's films," added Pinto. "People in Israel see his films as talking about other things - one talks about the war, another about a religious family, another about Arab Palestinians. 'The Bubble' is about youth."
The film opened in July 2006 in Israel. "There was a big buzz surrounding it; 'Walk on Water' had been a big success," said Fox. "But a few days after the film came out, the second war in Lebanon began. Movie houses were shutting down. But people in Tel Aviv started going to the movie, making this dichotomy between Tel Aviv and Israel clearer than ever. People saw it as, 'The Bubble is dancing while the country is up in flames.'"
But for the most part, Israel is behind its popular director. "Yossi and Jagger" was initially not supported by the Israeli army, claiming that it was inappropriate to depict a relationship between two soldiers of different ranks.
"They were politically correct enough not to say gay," said Fox, clearly amused at the memory. "But then different army units heard about the film, and it was shown on the army circuit. After we made 'Walk on Water,' and it became Israel's biggest international success, the response was, 'You are our son, you bring us honor, so we love you.'"
"The Bubble" had the support of the government and the army, in the form of equipment and permission to film in certain areas. Nevertheless the film, despite its hip, romantic-comedy factor, is ultimately a comment on political life in Israel, on the dichotomy not only between Tel Aviv youth and the rest of Israel, but between the haves and the have-nots, between those who are accepted as integral parts of Israeli society and those who are excluded.
"Israel is very progressive on many levels," said Fox. "I'm sorry to say, though, that this democracy doesn't apply to non-Jewish citizens, to Palestinians, to Israeli Arabs."
By Nancy Ramsey for CBSNews.com