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| All together now! |
With Eurovision fever at its height just now, everybody is in the mood for dancing, so it's just the time for Israeli filmmaker Eytan Fox's feelgood pop fairytale Cupcakes to come out on DVD. The story of six neighbours who enter the Universong Contest by mistake, it's an energetic film with characters who learn to make sense of their personal lives through their international celebrity experience. I caught up with Eytan to ask him about the film and about the Israeli band Ping Pong whose own Eurovision stardom he helped to create.
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| Time for a little respect. |
"The film was inspired by that story," he acknowledges, though noting that the narrative develops in a different direction. "The two men in the group were friends of mine, young journalists who wrote for radical alternative art magazines in Israel. They were very serious people who formed a little electro band and made foolish tunes up together, fun songs, and they recruited their roommates to help. Then one night they drank something..." he laughs. "They decided to write a song and send it to the Eurovision committee. Sure enough, they then got the announcement 'You were chosen!' This was in 2000. They never could have anticipated it. They couldn’t sing even if their lives depended on it and they couldn’t really dance, so they came to me.
"I was their friend the director. I'd never directed a band in my life but they said 'You have to save us!' Well, I worked out how to make them look okay but I couldn’t teach them to sing. It's one thing to do it in a studio where you can artificially make anybody sound good but that couldn't help when they had to sing live. So we went there and hoped for the best. It was a very fun experience. They wanted to say something so they went on stage with the Israeli and Palestinian flags. The song was a love story between Arabs and Jews so it made sense to them, and at the press conference they talked about these issues, but the Israeli government wanted to stop it. It was really problematic in many ways because Israel is a very nationalistic place. We have to be good at everything we do and represent Israel in the correct manner, so people in Israel got very upset... When we were coming back to the airport one person spat at the singer. But on other hand there was a happy version of that story in 1998 when Israel chose a transsexual singer, Dana International, and of course again people said 'How can this be?" Members of the Knesset were outraged and there was a big newspaper debate, but she won, and after that no-one cared. She had won respect and honour for Israel so she went to parliament and all those same people who had been so angry wanted to shake her hand. So that's probably the difference, that we didn't win!"
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| Cupcakes poster |
Alongside the narrative inspired by this adventure, the film tells many individual stories. I ask Eytan how he developed them and wove them all together.
"Every film I make is very personal," he responds. "I usually deal with stories that are very close to my life, with relationships and dynamics I know because I've experienced them, I've gone through them. Here it was the opposite. It was not as personal, not as close, as I really wanted to make a genre piece, a feelgood piece that would make me happy while making it make and happy when watching it. It let me think of a relatively diverese or heterogenic group of women, each one being something a bit like me or from my life. For Anat [the older character in the group] I thought of my mother, a wonderful baker who used to make cupcakes, so that was where the cupcakes in the film came from. She was left by my father and it took her lot of time to process that... For the ex beauty queen who became a lawyer, a friend of mine had herself gone down that route. She was a beauty queen when she was a teenager and then said 'I don’t want it any more, I don't want to be just a pretty face with men drooling over me.' She became a serious actress... For each one I was thinking of women and men that I know, and then there was the concept of neighbours. That sense of community does not exist in Israel anymore - an apartment building where everybody knows each other and is friends, where they organise Eurovision parties together and have meals together."
He had particular actors in mind for some of the roles throughout the writing process, he says, including Anat Waxman and Ofer Shechter "who was doing extreme children's TV at the time." Two roles had to be recast late in the day as a result of unexpected pregnancies, but he's very happy with the final line-up. "This is an A-list cast in Israel," he stresses. Anat, in particular, is more often found performing in Shakespeare of Chekov plays in the theatre.
Preparing the actors for the roles wasn't a big challenge, but the important thing for Eytan wasn't so much polishing them to Eurovision standards as getting them to look less professional, "to keep sense of people who have never stood on a stage before and are overwhelmed, excited and happy."
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| Seeing Paris for the first time. |
Can films like this perhaps contribute to making Israel a happier place once again? He's hesitant, not wanting to sound too self-important. "I think what they the can do is make people happier," he says. "I hope when people see a film like Cupcakes they leave the theatre smiling, and they see how nice smiling is and therefore maybe think they should smile more often. Then we could go back to being a smiley place, not a problematic, difficult, sad place. I hope it does give people the feeling that things can change and be a lot easier, that things can have happy endings. Even if only sticks for 10, 20 minutes, an hour. I’ve made a lot of serious films but I think sometimes when there’s a really good feelgood film or romantic comedy it can reach people in a different way."
Of course, Israel is not the only country with problems. In the film, Russia is represented at Universong by a gay man and his possibly trans, possibly drag queen partner. Was this a political comment?
"Yes," he says plainly. "I really, of course, am horrified by what’s happened and is still happening in Russia as regards human rights and homophobia, particularly as gays and lesbians in Russia, like anywhere in the world, just want to live and are afraid. Because of what's happening they can't come out, they can’t really live openly like everyone should be able to live. It's all a big lie that there are no gay people."
Do people in Israel still have the Eurovision parties he remembers from his youth?
"They do have partes but I think everyone in my world realises it's different from when we were kids," he says. "We had Brotherhood of Man, Lulu and Cliff Richard. It's not like that anymore. Maybe we’ve changed but I think the competitioon has changed as well. It used to be about pop songs and now I always think it's like a crazy circus and not about the singer or the song. There are these big grandiose performances and no more sweet singers with guitars."
Even if it's not what it was, Eytan admits he could talk about Eurovision all day. He's now off to make a biopic of an Israeli-born singer who shot to stardom in France. This film will be more of a tragedy, but Cupcakes is likely to be making people smile for some years to come.
