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Nagu'a (Hebrew) [Drifting]

By Golu
This was probably one of the earlier Israeli gay films to have come out back in 1982. Our main protagonists have only two things he cares about - his homosexuality and the fact that he is making a 'gay' film. This would be film maker always says ''I'm busy with my film right now'", except you never see him do anything about it, because he is much more interested in sleeping around with different guys. People simply wander into and out of Robi's life, and if his character evolves during the course of the story, the change is difficult to decipher.

Robi is a young Israeli who lives his grandmother and works at her store. He dreams of finding true love and becoming a movie director, both of which seem increasingly difficult. He has a friend with benefit situation with another guy named Han, who is married but they have good thing going. They both go to a cruising park, where Robi is supposedly looking for someone who looks like him and can play lad in the film. Over the course of the film he meets a cute teenager there and we have some love making scenes there. An ex-girlfriend then arrives in hopes to make him straight again. Meanwhile the granny is ashamed of having a gay boy living with her. He t hen meets two Arab boys, one of them is shot in leg and coerces one of them to have sex with him. He doesn't care or is shy of bringing all kinds of boys home while his granny hopelessly watches. Robbie's father, a Holocaust survivor with a heavy foreign accent, tries to explain to his son that the norm is a family with a wife and children, and gay men grow old alone. The film ends with Robbie failing to find any investors for his film, and he comes to terms with being gay.

We have seen a few films about film, but here the main lead is stuck in self-destructive patterns of behavior chasing dreams that are contradictory at best and unrealizable at worst. Maybe it was some sort of self-healing for the film maker (if this is supposed to be semi-autobiographical). It’s far from perfect and, at times, frustratingly inconsistent; but you also have to remember it came back in 1982. The plot is somewhat unclear and some scenes seem unnecessary. There was some nudity and very obvious sex scenes that I was quite surprised to see in an old movie. I do not have much idea about Israel as a society and its openness to LGBTQ+ circle back in the day (now everyone knows that Tel Aviv is almost the capital). The film is not a ground breaking effort but it is a good nostalgia to see something from the time gone by. If I had access to such films growing up, maybe my life would have taken a different course. (4.5/10)
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