Behind the lines
Yossi and Jagger looks at love in war.

By Dennis Harvey

FOR ALL THE slop on TV (aside from my new favorite thing ever, The Simple Life), the medium has always contained odd niches for kinds of feature-length drama that movies don't do very effectively – or at least not often enough. Think of Playhouse 90 of the '50s, Britain's extraordinary teleplays of the late '60s up to the early '80s (culminating in My Beautiful Laundrette), adventuresome U.S. "Movies of the Week" in the '70s, and various excellent Showtime or HBO projects of today. (Is anybody really surprised HBO finally got Angels in America made after others' failed attempts at a big-screen version?) These films benefit from several factors beyond the talent and commitment of their makers: The financial risks are much lower for TV than for theatrically distributed movies, which not only cost more but also have no guarantee of viewership. And on the flip side, production values are better than those afforded your average indie flick. So a certain amount of ambition doesn't have to be squelched, alongside more political (sometimes), less neatly wrapped narratives.

I haven't the faintest idea what constitutes everyday Israeli TV – one wonders if it has that same ever-so-slight "liberal bias" that our own has in contrast to an increasingly hyperconservative, morality-goes-to-hell-in-a-handbasket governmental tilt. But in any case, Israeli TV made Yossi and Jagger, which is rather like Laundrette in some general ways – in that it broke out to a very successful run in cinemas, hinges on a covert gay male relationship, and manages such complexity so offhandedly you leave wondering why so few movies can claim the same. Of course, that's what good art ought to do, make its own hard lifting look easy.

"Based on a true story" (yeah, whatever), Yossi and Jagger takes place during the Lebanon War in 1982. Its characters are Israeli Army personnel on a remote border base, housed in an underground bunker during snowy wintertime. Yossi (Ohad Knoller) is the small unit's shaven-headed commander, "Jagger" (Yehuda Levi) his deputy – the nickname bestowed because he "looks like a rock star." (Although "male model" might be more apt – this Jagger looks more cute and sweet than hedonistically sexy.) Early on the two go off to "check coordinates" in the "drill zone." This is a ruse; in fact they've left camp to have some alone time, a hillside fuck and a post-boff snowball fight. Utterly romantic, their little idyll underlines why many gay men have military fantasies – lust (let alone love) consummated in secret is very exciting.

In their absence, however, Yossi's superior (Sharon Regniano) arrives, his bristling heterosexual machismo bookended by two female attachés. One, glam and sexually boastful Goldie (Hani Furstenberg), is having an affair with him; the other, Yaeli (Aya Koren), has a crush on boyish nice-guy Jagger. She in turn is yearned for by earnest grunt Ofir (Assi Cohen) – perhaps the only person who realizes what Yossi and Jagger really mean to each other.

The gung-ho colonel announces the unit will stage an ambush tonight – to no one else's delight. Following this bad news, the titular figures have a private fight, mandatory-service soldier Jagger demanding some public (if nonmilitary) acknowledgment of their love while probable army careerist Yossi refuses. This tiff lends poignancy later when the ordered stakeout takes a very bad turn. At barely more than an hour, Yossi and Jagger ends memorably yet too soon – you'll wish scenarist Avner Bernheimer and his collaborators had anticipated the feature's international success, enabling them to deepen the exceptional but terse story by a half hour or more. But they were doing a small project for TV. (Amazingly, the Israeli military had no objection to this film – save fretting, apparently, over the fact that it showed officers involved with rank inferiors.) Director Eytan Fox manages everything with consummate skill, apart from one mistaken-for-sexual (by one key long-distance spy) moment that's just too rigged in the writing.

Yossi and Jagger was loudly protested at last June's San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival for portraying Israeli soldiers sympathetically. In political terms, the protesters were right. The film evades politics by making "the enemy" an abstract, invisible even when under attack.

Still, war is waged by those who seldom suffer its actual violence. Yossi and Jagger is about the rank and file – executors of policy who may barely comprehend or even oppose its invasive gist. There's something especially moving about this profound love story coming from a nation even more overtly imperialistic-aggressive than our own. Of course, they've got a smaller canvas to work on.

'Yossi and Jagger' opens Fri/12 at Bay Area theaters. See Movie Clock, in Film listings, for show times.