Directed by Eytan Fox

Starring Ohad Knoller, Yehuda Levi, Hani Furstenberg

Yossi & Jagger comes to America having played (according to the film’s press notes) to sold-out houses in its native Israel. Considering it’s based on a true story about a love affair between two soldiers, I suppose it’s a miracle of sorts that it even got made (it was financed for $200,000 by ICP, the Israeli cable network). But why the film was so enthusiastically received is rather a mystery.

Yossi (Ohad Knoller) and Lior, AKA Jagger (Yehuda Levi, “the Israeli Tom Cruise”), are Israeli army officers stationed in a remote base on the Israeli-Lebanese border. They’re in love, but the military being what it is, they have to keep their relationship a secret. (They often sneak off to an aptly named “drill zone” to make love.) The sweet, child-like Jagger (named by his regiment after Sir Mick because of his supposed rock-star qualities) wants to take Yossi home to his mother, but his butch, closeted partner isn’t ready to go public — nor say those three little words. (Even Jagger’s fondness for “diva” music makes him uncomfortable.) With a battle skirmish coming up, we just know theirs is not going to be a happy ending.

Director Eytan Fox, born in New York City and raised in Jerusalem, is good with actors and has a potentially interesting story to tell, but at a scrawny 71 minutes, Yossi & Jagger is more of a long short than a feature-length film. (Was Fox forced to trim Avner Bernheimer’s script because his funds ran out? Surely the money wasn’t eaten up by the cinematography, which is dark and grainy, like video that has been blown up to 35mm.) Since there is absolutely no back story to the film, we have no idea how these men met, how long they’ve had to hide their feelings for one another or even what Israel’s official military policy is — just making the boys likeable isn’t enough to engage us emotionally.

There is need for a fully realized, politically charged story about gays in the military, but Yossi & Jagger, alas, isn’t it. (Ken Cinema, Feb. 13-19)

*1?2

Directed by Sue Brooks

Starring Toni Collette and Gotaro Tsunashima

Japanese Story swept last year’s Australian Film Institute Awards and was part of the World Cinema showcase at this year’s Palm Springs International Film Festival. What did they see that I didn’t?

Sandy Edwards (a very blonde Toni Collette) is a dedicated Australian geologist who gets stuck taking Hiro (Gotaro Tsunashima), a chauvinistic Japanese businessman (“They’ve given me a woman driver,” he tells an associate on the phone), on a field trip through Western Australia’s Pilbara desert. “People die out in this country,” she tells him. “It happens all the time.” (So why do they go out in the middle of nowhere without so much as a bottle of water?)

Naturally, their car gets stuck almost immediately, so they must work together to dig themselves out. Having let down their respective defenses, they magically see one another in a new light and get horizontal once they get back to their hotel room (even though there has been nary a hint of sexual attraction between them up to this point). But this will be a one-night stand, because-prepare yourselves—tragedy is just around the next sand dune.

I suppose Japanese Story was intended to be a tender reminder that if two people from such radically different cultures can put aside their differences, perhaps there’s hope for us all. That may form the basis of a stirring speech at the United Nations, but in the hands of screenwriter Alison Tilson and director Sue Brooks, it makes for an uneventful, even frustrating, movie-going experience (although the deafening score certainly got my attention). The story is hard to follow (I never did understand why Sandy and Hiro were out in the desert, or why they continued their foolhardy trek the next day) and full of plot holes; there’s so little going on at any given time that we find ourselves focusing on, of all things, the story’s numerous implausibilities. Even as a showcase for the usually dependable Collette it fails to impress; the actress does everything she has been asked to do, but her performance — which runs the gamut from pained to panicked — brings no particular life to this dramatically stillborn vehicle. (Hillcrest Cinemas)

BOMB

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

Starring Michael Pitt, Eva Green, Louis Garrel

Bernardo Bertolucci has given us such memorable films as The Spider’s Strategem, The Conformist and The Last Emperor. He is also responsible for Luna (the one about the opera singer who sleeps with her son), The Sheltering Sky (I’m still yawning, 14 years later) and now the NC-17-rated The Dreamers, an embarrassing, self-consciously titillating “story of self-discovery” that takes the director back to France for the first time since the hotly controversial The Last Tango in Paris (remember the butter scene?) in 1972. Pardon me if I don’t whip out my party hat.

The “dreamers” of the title are Matthew (talented Michael Pitt, so terrific in Bully and Murder By Numbers), an angelic-looking American (from San Diego, no less) studying in France, and the sultry, incestuous brother and sister team of Theo (Louis Garrel) and Isabelle (Eva Green). Since they’re all film buffs, it seemed destined they would meet at the world-famous Cinematheque du Francaise. The story is set in 1968, a year of special fascination to Bertolucci and screenwriter Gilbert Adair (who adapted his novel, The Holy Innocents), cinephiles who were living in Paris at the time. “It was our very own cultural revolution,” says Matthew, a reference to the social unrest generated when Cinematheque director Henri Langlois was sacked by the government and the establishment closed its doors (albeit temporarily.)

Our pretty-to-look-at threesome (shades of Jules and Jim) debate politics and movies, guzzle wine and, once Theo and Isabelle’s bourgeois parents go on holiday, get naked and indulge in all sorts of kinky (but hardly sexy, despite Fabio Cianchetti’s satiny cinematography) behavior—not including, by the way, a ménage a trois, a cheat because we keep expecting it.

Audiences will be buzzing about the film’s (over) abundance of full-frontal nudity (involving both sexes, for a change). I’d like to say the skin parade is all in the name of high art, but it struck me more as a cheap ploy by a filmmaker trying desperately to show how hip he can be at age 63. “A filmmaker is like a peeping tom,” says one character of an article in the respected film journal Cahiers du Cinema. Judging by The Dreamers, Bertolucci took that quote far too literally. (Hillcrest Cinemas)

Recommended current releases: Big Fish, Cold Mountain, The Girl from Paris (Madstone), Lost in Translation, Mystic River, The Last Samurai, Monster, Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Something’s Gotta Give, 21 Grams, Girl with a Pearl Earring, The Company (for the dancing), My Architect (starts Feb. 20).

Kyle Counts is the film critic for the Gay and Lesbian Times