Review: Sublet Is a Poignant Look at Two Gay Men at a Generational Crossroads

Eytan Fox’s Sublet revolves around the unlikely friendship formed between a middle-aged New York Times travel writer, Michael (John Benjamin Hickey), and the young film student, Tomer (Niv Nissim), whose apartment he’s renting in Tel Aviv. The fastidious Michael is hardly thrilled by the state of the Airbnb rental when he arrives, but the cash-strapped Tomer convinces him to stay in exchange for showing his guest the city’s off-the-beaten spots. Theirs is a familiar odd-couple pairing, but Sublet is less concerned with accentuating the broad differences between Michael and Tomer than with mining how they navigate generational and cultural divides, and how they address their conflicting views on life before finding the beauty in each other’s mysteries and contradictions.

Divided into five segments, each corresponding to a day of the week, Fox’s low-key, warm-hearted film tracks the ebbs and flows of Michael and Tomer’s burgeoning friendship, remaining attuned to the circumstances that shape their lives. Tomer’s youthful vitality is evident in everything from his messiness to his passion for shooting low-budget horror films to casting his line on Grindr for a threesome. His devil-may-care attitude, and general disdain for monogamy, irks Michael, who dutifully Skypes with his husband (Peter Spears) every night. But Tomer’s zest for life also excites Michael, for reminding him of his younger days—that is, when he was having more than just the occasional sex and started wearing corny PJs and going to bed early. Tomer’s exuberance is really just the jolt in the arm Michael needs to pull him out of a funk that’s revealed to be spurred on by much more than a bout of jet lag.

While Michael embraces being sucked into Tomer’s fun but chaotic life, he remains haunted by sorrows new and old, namely the death of a lover from AIDS. After describing the plot of his first (and only) novel to Tomer, the young man’s knee-jerk reaction is to scoff at the prospect of anything too heavy or depressing in art, to which Michael essentially responds that his book isn’t misery porn, but rather pulled directly from his own life. Sublet abounds in moments such as this, which succinctly, albeit sometimes a bit too bluntly, allow the men to confront their biases and strongly held opinions and see things from a new perspective.

Michael is weighed down by the accrual of life’s surprises, both good and bad, leaving him feeling pensive and mellow. By contrast, the carefree Tomer is unsullied by the slings and arrows that life inevitably brings. But it’s their opposing attitudes that somehow ignites a romantic spark between them, and ultimately discombobulates the two men. Wisely, Sublet remains restrained and naturalistic, never allowing for grand, implausible twists of fate like Michael leaving his husband for Tomer. The film presents no grand epiphanies, but rather a slow, mutual journey toward common ground and genuine understanding. And in this small-scale portrait of a fleeting connection, Fox captures the powerful yet ineffable emotions that draw strangers—even those as outwardly different as Michael and Tomer—to one another, and which can provide solace in times when even loved ones can’t reach us.