Israeli women at war

Reluctant recruits: Smadar Sayar and Naarma Schendar
10 April 2012

There have been few films concentrating on the women soldiers in the Israeli army. Close to Home, made by Dalia Hager and Vidi Bilu, lays bare the attitudes of these enforced soldiers, suggesting a generation of apolitical young people who complete their national service utterly indifferent to the often fraught tasks in hand.

Mirit and Smadar are 18 and patrol the streets of Jerusalem arbitrarily stopping Arabs and asking for their identification. They also smoke, window shop and get on each other's nerves.

Mirit (Naarma Schendar) at first wants to be a good soldier but the fun-loving Smadar (Smadar Sayar) thinks the profiling they do is bogus. But soon both relax, except when their disciplinarian commanding officer (Irit Suki) is around.

When a bomb goes off, leaving Mirit covered in someone else's blood, she swoons over the handsome stranger she finds standing over her when she awakes.

While it's certainly a corrective to the usual heroic view of Israeli soldiery, and takes some pains to sympathise with the Palestinians, its portrait of the two girls is too shallow to convince.

Maybe there are recruits like this but we never see what they think or feel as women. Perhaps they don't deserve much analysis. But the lack of it makes for a film which promises more than it eventually delivers.

Close To Home (Karov La Bayit)
Cert: 15

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