Like high school,
with suicide bombers

>> Close to Home is a teen drama
about life in the Israeli military

by MARK SLUTSKY

Mandatory military service is a fact of life for pretty much every Israeli, men and women alike. So what’s actually surprising about Close to Home, a new film from Israeli directors Vardit Bilu and Dalia Hagar, is that it’s the first film (at least that I’ve seen appear on these shores) to frame the experience like a coming-of-age teen drama.

Mirit (Neama Shendar) and Smadar (Smadar Sayar) are a couple of 18-year-olds in the army, new recruits thrown together after one of their fellow soldiers loses it at a checkpoint and refuses to keep on strip-searching Palestinians. Despite sharing a similarly sulky mien, they otherwise couldn’t be more unlike each other: Mirit, who lives with her parents, is reserved and high-strung, while Smadar cops a tartly rebellious, devil-may-care attitude.

The two are charged with patrolling a small stretch of street in Jerusalem, and the movie follows the mostly mundane, and sometimes humiliating aspects of their job. A large part of it is just keeping tabs on civilians (and by civilians, they mean Arabs and Palestinians) and their comings and goings, taking down their names and checking ID cards. No wonder they’re distracted by the hats in the window of a local shop, or the hairdresser’s plans for their ’dos.

They behave a lot like kids in high school, and age-wise they’re obviously not far from it. They gossip, follow boys, tease each other, hang out, bicker, try and duck their commanding officer; they’re typical bored teens, in short, dealing with typical boring teenage stuff. Except, of course, for the occasional suicide bomber.

There’s a weird anxiety to Close to Home. In some ways the directors’ approach seems to be willfully mundane, to show life in the Israeli military as it’s actually lived, and to stay away from ideology or anything bigger than the street the girls patrol. But at the same time, the movie has so much to deal with—border searches, soldierly self-incrimination, life in a perpetual state of war, the emotional complexities of the girls’ friendship. It would take an ambitious movie to juggle all that, and to fuse the teen movie genre with the Israeli reality, and Close to Home doesn’t really try, making it feel frustratingly, intentionally limited.

Close to Home opens this Friday, May 18

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