Nimr is from Ramallah, studious and just that little bit shy. He’s working towards a postgraduate degree in Psychology at Birzeit, and hopes to do a Ph.D at Princeton. A visa allowing him to take classes at Tel Aviv University brings this dream just that bit closer within reach.
He has a secret life, though. (Don’t we all?) In the opening scene of Michael Mayer’s Out In The Dark, Nimr smuggles himself across the border dividing the Territories and Israel, and makes his way to the big city. Nimr is gay, you see, and Tel Aviv is the place to be, even for gay Palestinians.
Roy, who makes moves on Nimr almost as soon as they set eyes on each other in a gay bar, comes from the other side of the track. An affluent young lawyer working in his father’s firm, his is a life of presumed privilege, the only shadow on the horizon being some rather unsavoury business connections. Or perhaps not. Where would a lawyer be without questionable clientele, after all?
Anyway, it’s not that our two principals set out to make life difficult for each other, cherub’s arrows striking where they will and all that. But this is Israel, and the two are reaching out to each other across an intractable divide. Complications are inevitable.
Out In The Dark, at one remove, is a perfectly serviceable romance. The chemistry between Nimr (Nicholas Jacob) and Roy (Michael Aloni) is unforced. It does help that both are very easy on the eye as well, of course. Technically, the film is flawless, Ran Aviad’s cinematography teasing out subtle shades of night and light. Out In The Dark is delicious eye candy, I am pleased to report.
But the film, penned by Mayer and Yael Shafrir, runs into difficulties once it strays beyond this pleasing but not overly-committed brief. Of course, Politics get involved. (This is Israel, OK? Everything is political.) A sub-plot, involving Nimr’s familial connections with Very Unpleasant People and the blunt brutish hand of Shin Bet, is plausible enough in theory but unconvincing in practice. It isn’t quite that the predictability of Palestinian homophobia and Israeli Palesto-phobia comes as a surprise, but I’m sure there are more inventive ways of exploring these tensions. As it is, a film with promising prospects loses itself by taking itself perhaps a tad too seriously.
Out In The Dark (2012)
Directed by Michael Mayer, Starring Nicholas Jacob, Michael Aloni, Jamil Khoury
Written by Michael Mayer and Yael Shafrir
93 mins, Hebrew and Arabic w. English subtitles
Out In The Dark won Best Feature (along with Fill the Void) at the Haifa International Film Festival 2012, and is currently showing in Israeli theatres.
